tation, and,
when I lean over to get an earful I hear him sayin', "They're all
simple, sassy and suckers! We feed 'em oranges, oatmeal and olives!"

So, as I said before, they _may_ be such a thing as ghosts. After
watchin' that bread bakin' machine at play I'll go further than that.
There may be _anything_!

One day at the trainin' camp, a couple of weeks after we hit New York,
a handler comes to me and says they's two guys outside that wants to
see the Kid. I hopped out to take a flash at 'em, but the Kid has been
reached, and when I come on the scene he's shakin' hands with 'em. One
of these guys was dressed the way the public thinks bookmakers and con
men doll up and he wore one of them sweet, trustin' innocent faces like
you see on the villain in a dime novel. He looked to me like he'd
steal a sunflower seed from a blind parrot.

But it was the other guy that was the riot to me.

He was tall and lanky, dressed all in black like the pallbearer the
undertaker furnishes, and the saddest-lookin' boob I ever seen in my
life! If he wasn't the original old Kid Kill-Joy, he was the bird that
rehearsed him, believe me! Y'know just from lookin' at this guy, a man
would get to thinkin' about his past life, the time he throwed the baby
down the well when but a playful child, how old his parents was gettin'
and the time Shorty Ellison run off with the red-headed dame that lived
over the butcher's. You wished you had saved your money or somebody
else's, suddenly findin' out that it was a tough world where a poor man
didn't have a Chinaman's chance, and you wondered if death by drownin'
was painful or not.

That's the way it made you feel when you just looked at this guy. Ever
see one of 'em?

He had a trick of sighin'. Not just ordinary heaves, but deep, dark
and gloomy sighs that took all the life out of whoever he sighed at.
If they had that bird over in Europe, they never would have been no
war, because when he started sighin', nobody would have had enough
ambition left to fight. Every time he opened his mouth I thought he
was gonna say, "Merciful Heaven help us all!" or somethin' like that.
But he didn't. He just sighed.

The Kid tells me the riot of color was Honest Dan Leduc, and that he
was the best behaved guy that ever spent a week end in Sing Sing, where
he had gone every now and then to study jail conditions at the request
of thirteen men, the same bein' a judge and a jury. The sad-lookin'
boob w