The Kid gives 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.
"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!"
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, movin' his arms and shufflin' his feet. When he got warmed up and goin' good, he pushed forward at you with his hands like he was tryin' to insert his chatter right into you.