Humorous stories; Washington (State) -- Fiction; Western stories
But she was not saying. The thing moved too slowly. And still the woman
paltered with her poisoned tea and made cigarettes and muttered
inconsequently, as when she now broke out after a glance at the
photograph:
"That Ben Sutton certainly runs amuck when he buys his vests. He must
have about fifty, and the quietest one in the lot would make a leopard
skin look like a piker." Again her glance dreamed off to visions.
I seated myself before her with some emphasis and said firmly: "Now,
then!" It worked.
"Wilfred Lennox," she began, "calling himself the hobo poet, gets into
Red Gap one day and makes the rounds with that there piece of poetry you
see; pushes into stores and offices and hands the piece out, and like as
not they crowd a dime or two bits onto him and send him along. That's
what I done. I was waiting in Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale's office for a
little painless dentistry, and I took Wilfred's poem and passed him a
two-bit piece, and Doc Martingale does the same, and Wilfred blew on to
the next office. A dashing and romantic figure he was, though kind of
fat and pasty for a man that was walking from coast to coast, but a
smooth talker with beautiful features and about nine hundred dollars'
worth of hair and a soft hat and one of these flowing neckties. Red it
was.
"So I looked over his piece of poetry--about the open road for his
untamed spirit and him being stifled in the cramped haunts of men--and
of course I get his number. All right about the urge of the wild to her
wayward child, but here he was spending a lot of time in the cramped
haunts of men taking their small change away from 'em and not seeming to
stifle one bit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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