I ducked into the garage and got a big handful of rags and a hunk of string and a short stick. This I have been through before. I went in and kissed her pretty white face, and a couple of worry lines disappeared. "Get me a pan or something," I said and started dismantling the front of the heater. These gravity-flow oil heaters weren't built to make it easy to drain off excess oil. There's a brass plug at the inlet, but no one in history has been able to stir one, the oil man told me. I weigh 200 pounds stripped, but all I ever did was ruin a tool trying. The only way to get out the oil was to open the front, stuff rags down through the narrow fire slot, sop up the stuff and fish out the rags with the string tied around one end of the bundle. Then you wring out the rags with your bare hands into a pan. "Hey, Lottie," I yelled, "this is your roaster! It'll be hard to clean out the oil smell!" But, of course, it was too late. I had squeezed a half-pint of oil into it already. So I went on dunking and wringing and thinking how lousy my cigarettes were going to taste all evening and feeling glad that I delivered beer instead of oil for a living. * * * * * I got the stove bailed out and lit with only one serious blast of soot out the "Light Here" hole. Then I dumped the oil out in the alley and set the roaster pan in the sink. Lottie was peeling potatoes for dinner, and she snuggled her yellow curls on my shoulder kind of apologetically for the mess she had caused me. I scrubbed the soot and oil off my hands and told her it was all right, only next time, for gosh sakes, please turn the stove off at least. The water I was splashing into the roaster gathered up in little shrinking drops and reminded me that the pig-hocks I brought home for Sunday dinner were going to rate throwing out unless we got the oil smell out of the pan. "Tell you what you do," I said to Lottie. "Get me all your cleaning soaps and stuff and let's see what we got." Lottie is always trying out some new handy-dandy little kitchen helper compound, so she hefted up quite an armload. Now, when I was in high school, I really liked chemistry. "Charlie, Boy Scientist," my pals used to sneer at me. But I was pretty good at it, and I been reading the science magazines right along ever since. So I know what a detergent is supposed to do, and all about how soaps act, and stuff that most people take the advertisers' word for. "This one," I told Lottie, "has a lot of caustic in it, see?" She nodded and said that's the one that ruined her aluminum coffee pot. She remembered it specially. I poured some very hot tap water into the roaster and shook in the strong soap powder. "This is to saponify the oil," I explained. "What's saponify?" Lottie asked. "That means to make soap. Soap is mainly a mixture of some caustic with fat or oil. It makes sudsy soap." "But we got soap," she said. "Why don't you just use the soap we got?"