Page:The Leather Pushers (1921).pdf/186

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

was his last under my management. Still in that humor, he called on Miss Dolores Brewster and managed to get himself in wrong with her. This released the last brake the Kid had on himself, and when I fin'ly dug him up at midnight in a extry swell Piccadilly booze emporium he was buyin' for one and all, and if W. J. Bryan had seen the shape he was in he'd of bust out cryin'. A young army officer which had trailed around with the Kid all night told me they had been gave the raspberry at the Carlton when the Kid climbed up on the bar, announced himself as the only son of Old King Cole, and demanded that a covey of fiddlers be sent to him at once.

Kid Roberts opens a watery eye about noon the next day, drinks between four and twenty-one gallons of ice water, and apologizes to the world at large. He listens to my bawlin' out in silence whilst shavin', and then he sit down and wrote about ninety telegrams to Miss Dolores Brewster, sendin' one. They was no answer, and fin'ly, by the via of the telephone, he found out that Dolores and her dad had gone to Paris, leavin' no word for him what the so ever.

From then on I had my hands full keepin' this big kid within the bounds of reason and away from the festive brew. I give him lectures which would of got me thirty solid weeks on any Chautauqua circuit in the world, and I endeavored to keep right on his back from the time the alarm clock made good in the mornin' till we set the thing at night. But there was times when he managed to slip away, and by the day we hit Monte Carlo, with the battle less than a week off, constant cigarette