“You will be my assistant.”
“Yeah?” says I. “What do I do?”
He places Magpie and Lord Washburn on one side and on the other he puts
Bettina, mum-maw and Tip. In the middle is them two spitting cougars,
and setting on the edge of the loft is Mighty Jones.
Aloysius peeks at them through the camera and then loads the thing. He
takes the dingus and pours it full of some kind of powder and hands it
to me.
“Hold that over your head,” says he. “Put your finger into that ring and
when I requests it of you, pull down on it.”
I follers directions. Aloysius tells everybody to stand perfectly still,
and then says--
“Pull!”
* * * * *
I pulled. Yeah, I pulled. Ike Harper seems to have been created to
foller directions. Looking back at it, I comes to the conclusion that
if I’d ’a’ killed the professor when I first seen him, this world would
have been sweeter.
As I said before, I pulled. Comes a blinding flash of light, the yowl of
a scared cougar, the splintering crash of overweighted timbers, and, as
“Hip-Shot” Squires used to say, “---- took a recess.”
It appeared that one of them cougars came unto my bosom, and I sure
took it in. I went high, wide and handsome, and got clawed from heels
to dandruff. Something got me by the feet and something got me by the
head, and they pulled opposite directions. The feet end of me was
pointed towards the door, and whatever the power was on that end--it
won.
I remembers skidding on the seat of my pants off our door-step and down
that danged hill. I hooked my feet against a rock, and then the power on
my neck raises me upright and yanks me upside down again, and all this
time I’m locked in deadly combat with that danged cougar.
Suddenly we stops in a blaze of glory. I dodges a flock of stars and
tries to set up. Then the cougar in which I have my teeth, fingers
and spurs seems to set a precedent of natural history when it says in
a faint voice--
“Well, by ----, I hope we stay stopped!”
I unhooks from said cougar and looks into the peaceful face of Magpie
Simpkins.
“I thought you was a cougar,” says I.