Why didn't I tell the good wife
that the ponies put the crimp in my pocketbook instead of crawling
into this chasm of prevarication and trouble?"
"You can search me!" Bunch answered, thoughtfully.
"And that phony wire you sent me yesterday almost gave me a
plexus," I said bitterly. "Why did you frame up one of those
when-we-were-twenty-one dispatches from the front? It sounded like
a love song from Willie Hayface of Cohoes, after his first day on
Broadway. Didn't you know that my wife was liable to open that
queer fellow and put me on the toasting fork?"
Bunch blinked his eyes solemnly, but when I told him all about the
trouble his telegram had caused he simply rose up on his hind legs
and laughed me to a sit down.
"Well," he gasped after a long fit of cackling; "sister did intend
going out to Jiggersville and the only way I could stop her was to
suddenly discover that her health wasn't any too good, so I chased
her off to Virginia Hot Springs for a couple of weeks."
After all, Bunch had his redeeming qualities.
"I sent you that wire before I took sister's temperature," Bunch
explained, "and I quite forgot to send another which would put a
copper on the queens."
Once more he laughed uproariously and chortled between the
outbursts, "Now--ha, ha, ha!--I'm even for--ha, ha, ha!--for that
shoot the chute I did in your--ha, ha, ha--in your cellar--oh! ha,
ha, ha, ha!"
"Oh, quit your kidding!" I begged, and then, suddenly, "Say, Bunch,
will you sell the old homestead?"
Bunch stopped laughing and looked me over from head to foot.
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