for a man that had been livin' the way he had it was
an awful jolt. He couldn't be trusted to take the stuff himself, so they
hired valets to keep him doped with it.

"I scared the first one half to death," says the Commodore, "and the
next one I bribed to smuggle out ham sandwiches. Then they got this
fellow Babbitt to follow me around with that cursed gocart, and I
haven't had a moment's peace since. He's just about equal to a job like
that, Babbitt is. I make him earn his money, though."

You'd have thought so if you could have seen the old Commodore work up
games to throw Babbitt off the track. I put in most of the day watchin'
'em at it, and it was as good as a vaudeville act. About a quarter of an
hour before it was time for the dose the valet would come out and begin
to look around the grounds. Soon as he'd located the Commodore he'd
slide off after his tea wagon. That was just where the old boy got in
his fine work. The minute Babbitt was out of sight the Commodore makes a
break for a new hidin' place, so the valet has to wheel that cart all
over the lot, playin' peek-a-boo behind every bush and tree until he
nailed his man.

Now you'd think most anyone with a head would have cracked a joke now
and then with the old gent, and kind of made it easy all round. But not
Babbitt. He'd been hired to get medicated milk into the Commodore, and
that was all the idea his nut could accommodate at one time. He was one
of these stiff-necked, cold-blooded flunkies, that don't seem much more
human than wooden Indians. He had an aggravatin' way, too, of treatin'
the old chap when he got him cornered. He was polite enough, so far as
what he had to say, but it was the mean look in his ratty little eyes
that grated.

With every dose the Commodore got madder and madder. Some of the names
he thought up to call that valet was worth puttin' in a book. It seemed
like a shame, though, to stir up the old gent that way, and I don't
believe the medicine did him any more good. He took it, though, because
he'd promised his daughter he would. Course, I had my own notions of
that kind of treatment, but I couldn't see that it was up to me to jump
in the coacher's box and give off any advice.

Next mornin' I'd been out for a little leg-work and I was just joggin'
into the park again, when I hears all kinds of a ruction goin' on over
behind the stonewall. There was screams and yells and shouts, like a
Saturday-night riot in Double Alley. I po