I let him have it, too. "In your hat, fatty. My discharge went on the
books in forty-five!" He was shocked stiff, but he shut up.
The old man kept his face straight. "Won't you sit down, Mr. Miller?"
I sat. I still didn't like the chair. "This is General Hayes, and this
is General Van Dorf." They nodded stiffly, and I ignored them. He
didn't introduce the young man, not that I cared.
"Mr. Miller, we'd like to talk to you. Talk seriously."
"Afraid that I'll get mad and fly out the window?"
"I said seriously. It won't take long. Let's compress it into one
short sentence without the preliminaries: give these gentlemen a
demonstration like the last one."
I told him what he could do with his demonstration, and I told him
what he could do with his generals. The high school boy grinned when I
said that. He must have been old enough to have served in the army.
The generals were crimson. You don't get that kind of talk where they
worked. But the old man was unperturbed. "Let's make that one sentence
a paragraph. Give these gentlemen a demonstration as effective as the
last--and ten minutes after, if you like, you can walk out of here
free as the air."
I jumped at that. "Is that straight? If I do it again you'll let me
loose?"