Page:The Gentle Grafter (1908).djvu/212

 “On top of that,” says Caligula, “don’t say that we can’t have anything to eat.”

“Sit down, gentlemen,” says the landlord, “and in twenty minutes I’ll call you to the best breakfast you can get anywhere in town.”

That breakfast turned out to be composed of fried bacon and a yellowish edifice that proved up something between pound cake and flexible sandstone. The landlord calls it corn pone; and then he sets out a dish of the exaggerated breakfast food known as hominy; and so me and Caligula makes the acquaintance of the celebrated food that enabled every Johnny Reb to lick one and two-thirds Yankees for neat four years at a stretch.

“The wonder to me is,” says Caligula, “that Uncle Robert Lee’s boys didn’t chase the Grant and Sherman outfit clear up into Hudson’s Bay. It would have made me that mad to eat this truck they call mahogany!”

“Hog and hominy,” I explains, “is the staple food of this section.”

“Then,” says Caligula, “they ought to keep it where it belongs. I thought this was a hotel and not a stable. Now, if we was in Muskogee at the St. Lucifer House, I’d show you some breakfast grub. Antelope steaks and fried liver to begin on, and ven- 200