Steve raised a protesting hand.
'Not so early in the day, kid; not before breakfast,' he pleaded.
'Honest, I'm not strong enough. It ain't as if we was a vaudeville team
that had got to rehearse.'
'What's rehearse?'
Steve changed the subject.
'Say, kid, ain't you feeling like you could bite into something? I got
an emptiness inside me as big as all outdoors. How about a mouthful of
cereal and a shirred egg? Now, for the love of Mike,' he went on
quickly, as his godson opened his mouth to speak, 'don't say 'What's
shirred?' It's something you do to eggs. It's one way of fixing 'em.'
'What's fixing?' inquired William Bannister brightly.
Steve sighed. When he spoke he was calm, but determined.
'That'll be all the dialogue for the present,' he said. 'We'll play the
rest of our act in dumb show. Get a move on you, and I'll take you out
in the bubble, the automobile, the car, the chug-chug wagon, the thing
we came here in, if you want to know what bubble is, and we'll scare up
some breakfast.'
Steve's ignorance of the locality in which he found himself was
complete; but he had a general impression that farmers as a class were
people who delighted in providing breakfasts for the needy, if the
needy possessed the necessary price. Acting on this assumption, he
postponed his trip to the nearest town and drove slowly along the roads
with his eyes open for signs of life.
He found a suitable farm and, applying the brakes, gathered up William
Bannister and knocked at the door.
His surmise as to the hospitality of farmers proved correct, and
presently they were sitting down to a breakfast which it did his
famished soul good to contemplate.
William Bannister seemed less enthusiastic. Steve, having disposed
of two eggs in quick succession, turned to see how his young charge
was progressing with his repast, and found him eyeing a bowl of
bread-and-milk in a sort of frozen horror.
'What's the matter, kid?' he asked. 'Get busy.'
'No paper,' said William Bannister.
'For the love of Pete! Do you expect your morning paper out in the
woods?'
'No paper,' repeated the White Hope firmly.
Steve regarded him thoughtfully.
'I didn't have this trip planned out right,' he said regretfully. 'I
ought to have got Mamie to come along. I bet a hundred dollars she
would have got next to your meanings in a second. I pass. What's your
kick, anyway? What's all this about paper?'
'Aunty Lora says not to eat bread that doesn't come wrapped up in
paper,' said the White Hope, becoming surprisingly lucid. 'Mamie undoes
it out of crinkly paper.'
'I get you. They feed you rolls at home wrapped up in tissue-paper, is
that it?'
'What's tissue?'
