eye and impatience in the
other.

"'Hello, Curiosity,' says I. 'Get still a minute and let's have a look
at your freakship. How do you like being the willopus-wallopus or the
bim-bam from Borneo, or whatever name you are denounced by in the
side-show business?'

"'Jeff Peters,' says Collier, in a weak voice. 'Turn me loose, or I'll
slug you one. I'm in the extremest kind of a large hurry. Hands off!'

"'Tut, tut, Eddie,' I answers, holding him hard; 'let an old friend
gaze on the exhibition of your curiousness. It's an eminent graft you
fell onto, my son. But don't speak of assaults and battery, because
you're not fit. The best you've got is a lot of nerve and a mighty
empty stomach.' And so it was. The man was as weak as a vegetarian
cat.

"'I'd argue this case with you, Jeff,' says he, regretful in his
style, 'for an unlimited number of rounds if I had half an hour to
train in and a slab of beefsteak two feet square to train with. Curse
the man, I say, that invented the art of going foodless. May his soul
in eternity be chained up within two feet of a bottomless pit of
red-hot hash. I'm abandoning the conflict, Jeff; I'm deserting to the
enemy. You'll find Miss Dugan inside contemplating the only living
mummy and the informed hog. She's a fine girl, Jeff. I'd have beat you
out if I could have kept up the grubless habit a little while longer.
You'll have to admit that the fasting dodge was aces-up for a while. I
figured it out that way. But say, Jeff, it's said that love makes the
world go around. Let me tell you, the announcement lacks verification.
It's the wind from the dinner horn that does it. I love that Mame
Dugan. I've gone six days without food in order to coincide with her
sentiments. Only one bite did I have. That was when I knocked the
tattooed man down with a war club and got a sandwich he was gobbling.
The manager fined me all my salary; but salary wasn't what I was
after. 'Twas that girl. I'd give my life for her, but I'd endanger
my immortal soul for a beef stew. Hunger is a horrible thing, Jeff.
Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are
nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!'

"In such language Ed Collier discoursed to me, pathetic. I gathered
the diagnosis that his affections and his digestions had been
implicated in a scramble and the commissary had won out. I never
disliked Ed Collier. I searched my internal admonitions of suitable
etiquette to see if I