the Kid is ready to see us, so me and
Miss Vincent folleys her down the hall and she opens a door and calls
in,

"Visitors, Mister Scanlan!"

"Yeh?" pipes the Kid in a show-em-the exit voice. "Ah--can I have a
drink of--ah--water?"

"Certainly," she says. "I'll bring it now."

"Don't rush it!" says the Kid. "It might curdle! Wait till the
attendance falls off a bit!"

She laughs--and Miss Vincent didn't.

"Oho!" whispers the pet of the movies. "Like that, eh?"

We go in the room, and there's Scanlan layin' in the whitest bed I even
seen in my life and lookin' about as miserable as a millionaire's
nephew on the day his uncle dies. There's about three hundred pillows
under his head and neck, his arm is all bandaged up and beside the bed
is a table with a set of flowers on it.

And then there was that nurse!

"Pretty soft!" I says.

The Kid grins and then twists around to Miss Vincent and groans.

"Does it hurt much, you poor dear?" she says.

"I wonder how I stand it!" pipes the Kid, keepin' his face from me.

"Can I get you anything?" she asks him after a minute.

"Well," answers the Kid, "if I did want something we could send Johnny
for it." He looks at me meanin'ly. "Go out and git the right time!"
he tells me. "And while you're at it--take lots of it!"

I went outside and closed the door. I remembered bein' in a hospital
once, where they was examinin' guys for nerves, and one of the tests
was hittin' 'em in the knee with a book and watchin' if their legs flew
out. I don't remember the name of the book, but I figured on takin' a
chance. I breezed out to the desk in the hall and filled out one of
them entry blanks about myself, and then I dug up the doctor.

"Doc," I says, "I wish you'd gimme the East and West, there's somethin'
the matter with my nerve. I know you can fix me up, if anybody can,
because you got so much yourself."

"Just what is the East and West?" he asks me.

"Why, look me over!" I explains. "I wanna see what I need or should
get rid of."

He leads me in a little room to one side, and goes over me like a
lawyer lookin' for a clause in a contract he can bust. He looks at my
tongue till it begin to quiver from exposure to the air; he clocks my
pulse at a mile, two miles and over the jumps; he stuck a telephone
like you see in the foreign movies over my heart and listened in on the
internal gossip for twenty minutes; he walloped me on the chest with
the best he had