and made me sing a song called
"Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!" Then he shakes his head and tells me to put
on my coat.

"You're one of the healthiest specimens I ever examined!" he says.
"There's absolutely nothing the matter with you."

"Well, that's certainly tough, doc," I tells him, "because I sure want
to win one of them rooms like Scanlan has. I--wait a minute!" I
hollers, gettin' a flash. "You didn't gimme the book test!"

I hops over to the desk and grabs up a book off it. It was a big thick
one called "Paralysis to Pneumonia," and was written by a couple of
Greeks named "Symptoms and Therapeutics." I never heard of the thing
before, and I wished it had been "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or somethin' like
that, but I took a chance.

"Here!" I says. "I don't know if this is the right one or not, but
let's try it out on my knee, eh?"

I seen he didn't make me, so I explains about the nerve test I seen
where some of the guys throwed out their legs when hit, and some of 'em
didn't. He gimme the laugh then, and tells me to look out of the
window. I did and they's a terrible crash in back of me, but I kept
lookin' out like he told me. Then he says all right, I can turn
around, and, when I did, I see the book case has fell over on the
floor. He claims if I had been nervous, I would have jumped eighty
feet when it crashed down and as they is nothin' the matter with me, I
might as well be on my way. Well, I was up against it--but only for a
minute. That last crack of his gimme an idea. I makes a leap across
the floor, grabs my heart and starts to shake and shiver like a bum in
one of them "Curse of Drink" productions.

"What's the matter?" he calls out.

I looks wildly around the room, and I seen a fly upside down on the
window-sill tryin' to get to its feet.

"Oh!" I says. "I'm so nervous, doc, I'm shakin' like a crap-shooter.
D'ye see that fly? Well, it must have fell off the window just
then--it gimme an awful shock--y'know that sudden noise and--"

He throws up his hands.

"Come!" he tells me. "I'll assign you to a room."

That's how I come to get mixed up with the Red Cross.

Pretty soon they had the Kid's arm better than it ever was, but as they
was still workin' on his nerves, we stuck around at the sanitarium.
We're both on a diet, which meant that at each meal-time we was fed
about enough food to nourish a healthy infant about a half hour old.
The general idea of the stuff was along nursery lines