t hit something solid all right. It was
a feller who was wheeling out a hand truck loaded with boxes from the
shipping department. I had been standing by the shipping department
door, and I reached right agin him.

He wants to know if I am drunk or a blanked fool. So after some talk
of that kind I borrows a chew of tobacco of him and we gets right well
acquainted.

I helped him finish loading his wagon and rode over to the freight depot
with him and helped him unload her. Lifting one of them boxes down from
the wagon I got such a shock I like to of dropped her.

Fur she was marked so many dozen, glass, handle with care, and she was
addressed to Dr. Hartley L. Kirby, Atlanta, Ga.

I managed to get that box onto the platform without busting her, and
then I sets down on top of her awful weak.

"What's the matter?" asts the feller I was with.

"Nothing," says I.

"You look sick," he says. And I WAS feeling that-a-way.

"Mebby I do," says I, "and it's enough to shake a feller up to find a
dead man come to life sudden like this."

"Great snakes, no!" says he, looking all around, "where?"

But I didn't stop to chew the rag none. I left him right there, with his
mouth wide open, staring after me like I was crazy. Half a block away I
looked back and I seen him double over and slap his knee and laugh loud,
like he had hearn a big joke, but what he was laughing at I never knew.

I was tickled. Tickled? Jest so tickled I was plumb foolish with it. The
doctor was alive after all--I kept saying it over and over to myself--he
hadn't drownded nor blowed away. And I was going to hunt him up.

I had a little money. The perfessor had paid it to me. He had give me a
job helping take care of his hosses and things like that, and wanted me
to stay, and I had been thinking mebby I would fur a while. But not now!

I calkelated I could grab a ride that very night that would put me into
Evansville the next morning. I figgered if I ketched a through freight
from there on the next night I might get where he was almost as quick as
them bottles did.

I didn't think it was no use writing out my resignation fur the
perfessor. But I got quite a bit of grub from Biddy Malone to make a
start on, fur I didn't figger on spending no more money than I had to
on grub. She asts me a lot of questions, and I had to lie to her a
good deal, but I got the grub. And at ten that night I was in an empty
bumping along south, along with a cross-eyed felle