I wanted him to have something by which to always remember me, and I guess
he has.
Speaking of waiters, reminds me of one at Glendive, Montana. We had to
telegraph ahead in order to get a place to sleep, and when we registered
the landlord shoved out an old double-entry journal for us to record our
names and postoffice address in. The office was the bar and before we
could get our rooms assigned us, we had to wait forty-five minutes for the
landlord to collect pay for thirteen drinks and lick a personal friend.
Finally, when he got around to me, he told me that I could sleep in the
night bar-tender's bed, as he would be up all night, and might possibly
get killed and never need it again, anyhow. It would cost me $4 cash in
advance to sleep one night in the bartender's bed, he said, and the house
was so blamed full that he and his wife had got to wait till things kind
of quieted down, and then they would have to put a mattress on the 15 ball
pool table and sleep there.
I called attention to my valuable valise that had been purchased at great
cost, and told him that he would be safe to keep that behind the bar till
I paid; but he said he wasn't in the second-hand valise business, and so I
paid in advance. It was humiliating, but he had the edge on me.
At the tea table I noticed that the waiter was a young man who evidently
had not been always thus. He had the air of one who yearns to have some
one tread on the tail of his coat. Meekness, with me, is one of my
characteristics. It is almost a passion. It is the result of personal
injuries received in former years at the hands of parties who excelled me
in brute force and who succeeded in drawing me out in conversation, as it
were, till I made remarks that were injudicious.
So I did not disagree with this waiter, although I had grounds. When he
came around and snorted in my ear, “Salt pork, antelope and cold beans,”
at the same time leaning his full weight on my back, while he evaded the
revenue laws by retailing his breath to the guests without a license, I
thought I would call for what he had the most of, so I said if he didn't
mind and it wouldn't be too much trouble, I would take cold beans.
I will leave it to the calm, impassionate and unpartisan reader to state
whether that remark ought to create ill-feeling. I do not think it ought.
However, he was irritable, and life to him seemed to be cold and dark. So
he went to the general delivery window that led into the cold bean
laboratory, and remarked in a hoarse, insolent, and ironical tone of
voice:
“Nother damned suspicious looking character wants cold beans.”
Fifteen Years Apart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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