Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/158

148 imaginin I'm goin' to make that studio-lizard come across wit' that dough—with that dough," he amended, remembering, in his excitement, certain old-time admonitions as to the utterance of his mother-tongue.

"But I don 't want you to do that!" cried Teddie, harboring a strangely muddled up and reluctant admiration for the deluded young fire-eater with the Saint Anthony light in his blazing blue eyes.

"Of course yuh don't, for the thing's got yuh buffaloed the same as yuh got me buffaloed," proclaimed the knight of the ring. "And the whole lay-out's wrong. The only thing that got hurt about that guy was his dignity. I knew what I was doin' all the time. I held back on the sleep-punch, and played wit' him. I didn't give him anything that a pound of beefsteak wouldn't put right inside o' twenty-four hours and he knows it as well as I do. But now he's pulled this blackmail stuff I'm goin' to put him wise to how I was toyin' wit' him. I'm goin' to let him see that if he ever so much as opens his trap about this business