Page:Leon Wilson - Ruggles of Red Gap.djvu/218

204 almuns under a fern and et the whole lot from time to time, kind of absent like. It helped some, but it wasn't dinner."

"Same here," put in the Mixer, saturating half a slice of bread in the sauce of the stew. "I can't afford to act otherwise than like I am a lady at one of them dinners, but the minute I'm home I beat it for the icebox. I suppose it's all right to be socially elegant, but we hadn't ought to let it contaminate our food none. And even at that New York hotel this summer you had to make trouble to get fed proper. I wanted strawberry shortcake, and what do you reckon they dealt me? A thing looking like a marble palace—sponge cake and whipped cream with a few red spots in between. Well, long as we're friends here together, I may say that I raised hell until I had the chef himself up and told him exactly what to do; biscuit dough baked and prized apart and buttered, strawberries with sugar on 'em in between and on top, and plenty of regular cream. Well, after three days' trying he finally managed to get simple—he just couldn't believe I meant it at first, and kept building on the whipped cream—and the thing cost eight dollars, but you can bet he had me, even then; the bonehead smarty had sweetened the cream and grated nutmeg into it. I give up.

"And if you can't get right food in New York, how can you expect to here? And Jackson, the idiot, has just fired the only real cook in Red Gap. Yes, sir; he's let the coons go. It come out that Waterman had sneaked out that suit of his golf clothes that Kate Kenner wore in the minstrel show, so he fired them both, and now I got to support 'em, because, as long as we're friends here, I don't mind telling you I egged the coon on to do it."