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I pushed it out of the way, but had gone on no more than three or four steps when I caught my foot in a rug which had got twisted in a heap round the fallen chair. I disentangled myself from its coils, only to slip and almost lose my balance by stepping into some spilled liquid which lay thick and greasy on the bare boards.
Above it hung scores of ragged gray and red socks and Mackinac boots and jackets which had been washed by the men themselves. Around were the grimy bunks where the forty men slept like tramps in a steamer's hold. The quilts were grimy, and the posts greasy and shining with the touch of hands. There were no chairs only a kind of rude stool made of boards.
"You men kin come in an' eat," she announced; and the mountaineers, knocking the ashes from their pipes, trailed into the kitchen. The place was lit by the fire in a cavernous hearth where the cooking was still going forward with skillet and crane. The food, coarse and greasy, but not unwholesome, was set on a long table covered with oilcloth.
On going forward she perceived it to be a huge fat man in torn and greasy garments. His gray hair straggled down over his forehead. His small, bleared eyes, sparkling from amidst great rolls of red fat, swept eagerly over the girl's upturned face. He laughed, his brown, disordered teeth gleaming under a gray, grizzled moustache from which beer-drops dripped.
At ten o'clock in the morning there was a table d'hote for breakfast, a wonderful repast, which overflowed into every room and pervaded the whole establishment. I sat down with a hundred hungry marketers, fat, brown, greasy men, with a good deal of the rich soil of Languedoc adhering to their hands and their boots. I mention the latter articles because they almost put them on the table.
"Oh, that was disgraceful, but it really could not be helped we had greasy fried potatoes until we could not stand them another day, and Bolton found them in the kitchen late one night ready for the skillet the next morning, and filled them with tooth powder, and that ended it." "I'd have set you fellows out on the sidewalk if I'd been Mrs. Hicks," laughed Morris.
He was attired in a greasy leathern jerkin, tight hose of the same material, and had a bugle suspended from his neck, and a sharp hunting-knife thrust into his girdle. In his hand he bore a spear like his master, and was followed by a grey old lurcher, who, though wanting an ear and an eye, and disfigured by sundry scars on throat and back, was hardy, untiring, and sagacious.
Even as he leapt, my foot slipped upon the greasy deck; I staggered backward one step two steps and then fell with a crash down the unguarded forecastle ladder. As my senses came gradually back I could distinguish a narrow, dingy cabin, dimly lit by one flickering oil-lamp which swung from a rafter above.
The man was a runner, of course, for this underground, unlicensed gaming-house, who had picked me out as a possible victim. When the moment arrived I knocked at the door. It was opened, not by the greasy Jack-in-the-box with the emerald pin, but by a deferential old man, who looked at me for a moment, holding the door with his foot.
He was a big, fat, greasy person in a bowler hat. "Here," he said. "You wait a bit. What d'ye mean by throwing that pore man in the river?" I opened the door of the taxi and Joyce jumped in. "What's it got to do with you, darling?" asked Tommy affably. "What's it got to do with me!" he repeated indignantly. "Why, it's just the mercy o' Gawd " "Come on, Tommy," I said.
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