He had met with two strokes of luck--the accessible bottle and the incredibly generous manager. They had left him just as hungry and thirsty as before. Now he encountered a third gift of fortune. On the plate glass window of a restaurant was the flamboyant announcement: EATING CONTEST TONIGHT AT MONTE'S RESTAURANT! FOR THE CHAMPIONSHIP OF THE WORLD! ENTRIES BEING TAKEN NOW! NO CHARGE IF YOU EAT ENOUGH FOR AT LEAST THREE PEOPLE. Ollie's face brightened. The way he felt, he could have eaten enough for a hundred. The fact that the contestants, as he saw upon reading further, would be limited to hard-boiled eggs made no difference to him. For once he would have a chance to eat everything he could get down his yawning gullet. That night it was clear that neither the judges nor the audience thought much of Ollie as an eater. Hungry he undoubtedly was, but it was obvious that his stomach had shrunk from years of disuse, and besides, he didn't have the build of a born eater. He was long and skinny, whereas the other contestants seemed almost as broad and wide as they were tall. In gaining weight, as in so many other things, the motto seemed to be that those who already had would get more. Ollie had too little to start with. In order to keep the contest from developing an anticlimax, they started with Ollie, believing that he would be lucky if he ate ten eggs. Ollie was so ravenous that he found it difficult to control himself, and he made a bad impression by gulping the first egg as fast as he could. A real eater would have let the egg slide down rapidly yet gently, without making an obvious effort. This uncontrolled, amateur speed, thought the judges, could only lead to a stomachache. Ollie devoured the second egg, the third, the fourth, and the rest of his allotted ten. At that point, one of the judges asked, "How do you feel?" "Hungry." "Stomach hurt?" "Only from hunger. It feels like it got nothin' in it. Somehow, them eggs don't fill me up." Somebody in the audience laughed. The judges exchanged glances and ordered more eggs brought on. From the crowd of watchers, cries of encouragement came to Ollie. At this stage, there was still nobody who thought that he had a chance. Ollie proceeded to go through twenty eggs, forty, sixty, a hundred. By that time, the judges and the crowd were in a state of unprecedented excitement. Again a judge demanded, "How do you feel?" "Still hungry. They don't fill me up at all." "But those are large eggs. Do you know how much a hundred of them weigh? Over fifteen pounds!" "I don't care how much they weigh. I'm still hungry." "Do you mind if we weigh you?" "So long as you don't stop givin' me eggs, okay." They brought out a scale and Ollie stepped on it. He weighed one hundred and thirty-nine pounds, on the nose. Then he started eating eggs again. At the end of his second hundred, they weighed him once more. Ollie weighed one hundred thirty-eight and three-quarters.