Page:The Country Boy.djvu/154

146 I finally grabbed and held one rooster, while the other one treed me on the bed. I was in the most awful position a fellow could be placed in in a strange hotel, with a Spanish gamecock in my arm treed on top of the bed, with the other rooster strutting around over the broken pitcher, just dying to get a bill hold of my bare shins. I pressed the button and soon the bellboy came, but he couldn’t get in as I had left the key in the door on the inside. I tried to explain my position over the transom. After shivering about for an hour, I thought of the only scheme of letting them fight until I dressed. Then I took them to a back street and there proceeded to hold them until the afternoon, when hunger drove me back to the hotel. The colored chambermaid found a bucket and a tub and I put one under each and never felt such relief in my life.

I was getting pretty hungry and I was completely broke save for twenty cents which I invested where it would mean the most in oyster soup. All at once it dawned upon me that I was five hundred miles from where my railroad transportation was available, and that I had a hotel bill yet to pay, and like a fool