e place looked as though when the gas man made his last call he'd
taken the fixtures along with the meter.

Yet the Boss seemed to be tickled to death with the whole shooting
match. At dinner that night he made me sit at one end of the dining-room
table while he sat at the other, and we were so far apart we had to
shout at each other when we talked. The backs of some of those
dining-room chairs were more than eight feet tall. It was like leaning
up against a billboard. The waiters looked like stage villains out of a
job, and whenever they passed the potatoes I peeled my eye for a knife
play. It didn't come though. Nothing did.

We put in nearly a week rummaging through that moldy old barracks. It
was three days before I could come down to breakfast without getting
lost. The Boss found a lot to look at and paw over; old books and
pictures, rusty tin armor and such truck. He even poked around in the
coal cellars that they called dungeons.

I liked being up in the towers best. I'd go up there and look about due
west, where New York was the last time I saw it. I never wanted wings
quite so bad as I did then. And, say, I'd given up a month's salary for
a sporting extra some nights. Dull? Why, there are crossroads up in
Sullivan County that would seem like the Tenderloin alongside of that
place.

Funny thing, though, was that the Boss was so stuck on it. He'd gas
about the lakes, and the mountains, and the sky, and all that, pointing
'em out to me as if they were worth seeing, when I'd seen better'n that
many a time, painted on back drops--and could get away from 'em when I
wanted. But here it was a case of nowhere to stay but in. You couldn't
go pikin' around the landscape without falling off the edge.

Guess I'd have gone clean nutty if it hadn't been for the little glove
play we did every afternoon. We had some of the chorus hands fix up a
nice lot of straw in a corner of the courtyard, so's to sort of
upholster the paving stones, and after we got used to the new foot-work
it was almost as good as a rubber mat.

We'd been having a gingery little go one day, with the whole crew of the
castle, from head purser down to the second assistant pan wrastler,
holding their breath in the background, and I was playing shower bath
for the Boss with a leather bucket, dipping out of the fountain pool and
sousing it over him, when I spots a deadhead in the audience.

She'd been playin' peek-a-boo behind one of them big stone pilla