There came to the restaurant where Dickie worked, a certain sallow and irritable man, no longer in his early youth. He came daily for one of his three meals: it might be lunch or dinner or even breakfast, Dickie was always in haste to serve him. For some reason, the man's clever and nervous personality intrigued his interest. And this, although his customer never threw him a glance, scowled at a newspaper, barked out an order, gulped his food, stuck a fair-sized tip under the edge of his plate, and jerked himself away. On a certain sluggish noon hour in August, Dickie, as far as the kitchen door with a tray balanced on his palm, realized that he had forgotten this man's order. He hesitated to go back. "Like as not," reasoned Dickie, "he didn't rightly know what the order was. He never does look at his food. I'll fetch him a Spanish omelette and a salad and a glass of iced tea. It's a whole lot better order than he'd have thought of himself." Nevertheless, it was with some trepidation that he set the omelette down before that lined and averted countenance. Its owner was screwed into his chair as usual, eyes, with a sharp cleft between their brows, bent on his folded newspaper, and he put his right hand blindly on the fork. But as it pricked the contents of the plate a savory fragrance rose and the reader looked. "Here, you damn fool--that's not my order," he snapped out. Dickie tasted a homely memory--"Dickie damn fool." He stood silent a moment looking down with one of his quaint, impersonal looks. "Well, sir," then he said slowly, "it ain't your order, but you look a whole lot more like a feller that would order Spanish omelette than like a feller that would order Hamburger steak." For the first time the man turned about, flung his arm over his chair-back, and looked up at Dickie. In fact, he stared. His thin lips, enclosed in an ill-tempered parenthesis of double lines, twisted themselves slightly. "I'll be derned!" he said. "But, look here, my man, I didn't order Hamburger steak; I ordered chicken." Dickie deliberately smoothed down the cowlick on his head. He wore his look of a seven-year-old with which he was wont to face the extremity of Sylvester's exasperation. "I reckon I clean forgot your order, sir," he said. "I figured out that you wouldn't be caring what was on your plate. This heat," he added, "sure puts a blinder on a feller's memory." The man laughed shortly. "It's all right," he said. "This'll go down." He ate in silence. Then he glanced up again. "What are you waiting for, anyway?" Dickie flushed faintly. "I was sort of wishful to see how it would go down." "Oh, I don't mean that kind of waiting. I mean--why are you a waiter in this--hash-hole?" Dickie meditated. "There ain't no answer to that," he said. "I don't know why--" He added--"Why anything. It's a sort of extry word in the dictionary--don't mean much any way you look at it."