He says it wouldn't, that nothin' less'n capital punishment would reform a nerve like that; so I tells him to blaze away. No use goin' into details. Guess you've been there. "Say, Doc.," says I once when he was fittin' a fresh auger into the machine, "you ain't mistakin' me for the guilty party, are you?" "Did I hurt?" says he. "You don't call that ticklin', do you?" says I. But he only grins and goes on with the excavation. After he's blasted out a hole big enough for a terminal tunnel he jabs in a hunk of cotton soaked with sulphuric acid, and then tamps down the concrete. "There!" says he, handin' me a drug store drink flavored with formaldehyde. "In the course of forty-eight hours or so that nerve will be as dead as a piece of string. Meantime it may throb at intervals." That's what it did, too! It dies as hard as a campaign lie. About every so often, just when I'm forgettin', it wakes up again, takes a fresh hold, and proceeds to give an imitation of a live wire on an alternatin' circuit. "Ahr chee!" says Swifty Joe. "To look at the map of woe you're carryin' around, you'd think nobody ever had a bum tusk before." "Nobody ever had this one before," says I, "and the way I look now ain't chronic, like some faces I know of." "Ahr chee!" says Swifty, which is his way of bringin' in a minority report. The worst of it was, though, I'm billed to show up at Rockywold for a May party that Sadie and Mrs. Purdy-Pell was pullin' off, and when I lands there Friday afternoon the jaw sensations was still on the job. I'm feeling about as cheerful and chatty as a Zoo tiger with ingrowin' toenails. So, after I've done the polite handshake, and had a word with Sadie on the fly, I digs out my exercise uniform and makes a sneak down into their dinky little gym., where there's a first class punchin' bag that I picked out for Purdy-Pell myself. You know, I felt like I wanted to hit something, and hit hard. It wa'n't any idle impulse, either. That tooth was jumpin' so I could almost feel my heels leave the floor, and I had emotions that it would take more than language to express proper. So I peels off for it, down to a sleeveless jersey and a pair of flannel pants, and starts in to drum out the devil's tattoo on that pigskin bag. I was so busy relievin' my feelin's that I didn't notice anything float in the door; but after awhile I looks up and discovers the audience. She's a young female party that I didn't remember havin' seen before at any of the Rockywold doin's; but it looks like she's one of the guests, all right. Well, I hadn't been introduced, and I couldn't see what she was buttin' into the gym. for, anyway, so I keeps right on punchin' the bag; thinkin' that if she was shocked any by my costume she'd either get over it, or beat it and have a fit.