es him a slow straight arm, and Tony goes over the table
backwards, landin' right beside his master.

"No spika da Engleesh!" says Scanlan, as Tony disappears.

I grabbed him by the arm.

"Show me them bottles," I says, gettin' wise in a flash.

The Kid takes out two _empty_ non-refillables and tosses 'em in the
grass.

"My!" he says, dreamily. "How that little guy went to it!"

Toot! Toot! Toot! goes the Santa Fe flier pullin' out with G. Herbert
and Helen Dear.

"Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha--ho, ho, ho, ho!" screams Van Ness from
under the table. "She promised--ha, ha, ha! to cheer me up--hic--ha,
ha, ha! and she--hic--certainly--ha, ha, ha!--made good!"

CHAPTER VI

THE UNHAPPY MEDIUM

They may be such a thing as a ghost, but I don't believe it! At the
same time, I'm willin' to admit that my feelin's in the matter ain't
gonna prove the ruin of the haunted house promoters. They's a whole
lot of things which I look on as plain and simple bunk, that the
average guy studies at college. But the reason I say they _may_ be, is
because when me and Kid Scanlan come back East this year we stopped off
somewheres in the hurrah for prohibition part of the country and was
showed over what the advertisin' matter admitted to be the greatest
bakery in the world.

I think them ad writers was modest fellers. That joint was not only
the world's greatest bakery, it was the world's greatest _anything_!

I never really knowed a thing about bread, except that you put butter
on it, until I give that place the up and down.

What I don't know about the staff of life now would never get you
through Yale. I might go farther than that and come right out with the
fact that I have become a abandoned bread fiend and got to have it or I
foam at the mouth, since I seen how it was made at this dough foundry.

A accommodatin' little guy took hold of me and the Kid and showed us
all over the different machine shops where this here bread was mixed,
baked and what-notted for the trade. Our charmin' guide must have come
from a family of auctioneers and circus barkers and he never heard of
no sums under ten or eleven thousand in his life. He knowed more about
figures than Joe Grady, who once filled in a summer with a Russian
ballet, and he had been wound up and set to deliver chatter at the rate
of three words a second, provided the track was fast and he got off in
front. He talked with his whole body, waggin' his head, movi