Quivering with tremors of laughter, he launched himself again. Because he could not leave them, save by the inch, they moved off several yards to the curb. Grow old along with me!
“That’s a damn shame,” said George Graves, looking after him and shaking his head. “Where’s he going?”
“To supper,” said Eugene.
“To supper!” said George Graves. “It’s only four o’clock. Where does he eat?”
Not where he eats, but where he is eaten.
“At the Uneeda,” said Eugene, beginning to choke, “It takes him two hours to get there.”
“Does he go every day?” said George Graves, beginning to laugh.
“Three times a day,” Eugene screamed. “He spends all morning going to dinner, and all afternoon going to supper.”
A whisper of laughter came from their weary jaws. They sighed like sedge.
At this moment, dodging briskly through the crowd, with a loud and cheerful word for every one, Mr. Joseph Bailey, secretary of the Altamont Chamber of Commerce, short, broad, and ruddy, came up by them with a hearty gesture of the hand:
“Hello, boys!” he cried. “How’re they going?” But before either of them could answer, he had passed on, with an encouraging shake of his head, and a deep applauding “THAT’S right.”
“WHAT’S right?” said Eugene.
But before George Graves could answer, the great lung specialist, Dr. Fairfax Grinder, scion of one of the oldest and proudest families in Virginia, drove in viciously from Church Street, with his sinewy length of six feet and eight inches coiled tensely in the deep pit of his big Buick roadster. Cursing generally the whole crawling itch of Confederate and Yankee postwar rabbledom, with a few special parentheses for Jews and niggers, he drove full tilt at the short plump figure of Joe Zamschnick, men’s furnishings (“Just a Whisper Off The Square”).
Joseph, two yards away from legal safety, hurled himself with a wild scream headlong at the curb. He arrived on hands and knees, but under his own power.
