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 "Oh!" says friend nurse, lookin' fearfully disappointed. "You don't mean to say you're selling a patent medicine, do you?"

"Be yourself—I'm laughin' from you!" snorts Ptomaine. Me and the Kid is in convulsions, no foolin'! "The only thing I'm sellin' is myself. I'il tell you what put Kid Roberts over—my cookin'!"

"You're a cook?" asks the nurse, not sure whether she's bein' kidded or not.

That's like askin' Babe Ruth has he ever saw a ball game!

"Not a cook—Cook himself!" whinnies Ptomaine, loudly, "I was born in a kitchen and dragged up in Table de Hôte, France. When I was a young infant I played with fryin' pans instead of rattles! I never seen no milk when I was a baby, they raised me on batter and grease. I studied at restaurants instead of at school and I fin'ly graduated with the rare degree of G. C. O. E.—Greatest Chef on Earth! I'm good and I know it. Believe me, Sweetness, I broil a cruel steak!"

Nursie wipes her Alice-blue eyes.

"I'll have to try one of your steaks sometime," she says.

"Do that!" says Ptomaine, lookin' at her like a castaway would look at the Leviathan. "I'm a son-of-a-gun on wheels with a skillet!"

Then we went in to the doctor. Intermission.

Well, as the oil driller remarks, that was the start of Ptomaine's weekly romance. The nurse's name turned out to be Hilda Dahlstrom and she seemed to