So the Doc here, he plied me -- plied me and plied me -- till I said some things I maybe shouldn’t have. (By the “Doc”, I don’t mean the sawbones, I mean the slybones, Doctor J.) Got me reminiscing about my old stablemate and companion in sin, One Tooth Scully. -- Mind you, that’s what other folks called him, but I never called him that. True, he didn’t have but the one tooth. But how does that define the man? No more than Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson. (Funny, though, him having two sheds…)
Now right away you’re saying to yourself: How did you, a city boy, come to know a wand’rin’ ramblin’ wastrel country-boy like old One-Tooth ? Well the answer is plain as day, if you’ll all just hold your horses for a sec. The guy spent his time riding the rails, like the planets rounding round about the sun; and stands to reason, time to time, he’d step off and check out the local soup kitchen, or Salvation Army, or that house where any man not made of wood must (for so we’re made) periodically refresh himself. And one day he stopped off by my city -- think of it as Newark, just to have an image in your head.
Chance would have it, I was down by the rail-yards myself that day, when I see this geezer roll tumbling out the side of a freight-car -- train slowed but it didn’t stop, and him just rolling and rolling like a tumbleweed. But then bright as a bronco he stands right up and dusts himself off, and he flashes me his signature one-tooth grin…
[Continued here.]
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