The thing moved too slowly. And still the woman
paltered with her poisoned tea and made cigarettes and muttered
inconsequently, as when she now broke out after a glance at the
photograph:
"That Ben Sutton certainly runs amuck when he buys his vests. He must
have about fifty, and the quietest one in the lot would make a leopard
skin look like a piker." Again her glance dreamed off to visions.
I seated myself before her with some emphasis and said firmly: "Now,
then!" It worked.
"Wilfred Lennox," she began, "calling himself the hobo poet, gets into
Red Gap one day and makes the rounds with that there piece of poetry you
see; pushes into stores and offices and hands the piece out, and like as
not they crowd a dime or two bits onto him and send him along. That's
what I done. I was waiting in Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale's office for a
little painless dentistry, and I took Wilfred's poem and passed him a
two-bit piece, and Doc Martingale does the same, and Wilfred blew on to
the next office. A dashing and romantic figure he was, though kind of
fat and pasty for a man that was walking from coast to coast, but a
smooth talker with beautiful features and about nine hundred dollars'
worth of hair and a soft hat and one of these flowing neckties.
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