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Miss Miller, from the sofa, told Mr. Klinker archly that he was so material. She had only the other day mastered the word, but even that is more than could be said for Mr. Klinker. Major Brooke stood by the Latrobe heater, reading the evening paper under a flaring gas-light. He habitually came down early to get it before anybody else had a chance. By Miss Miller on the sofa sat Mr.
Careful listening disclosed the fact that Buck Klinker, who had as usual walked up from the gymnasium with Queed, was changing his shoes in the next room, preparatory for supper. Otherwise the house was very still. Fifi had been steadily reported "not so well" for a long time and, for two days, very ill.
I know what's your trouble, Doc, just like you had told me yourself." "Ah? What, Mr. Klinker?" "Exercise." "You mean lack of exercise?" "I mean," said Klinker, "that you're fadin' out fast for the need of it." The two men pushed on up Centre Street, where the march of home-goers was now beginning to thin out, in a moment of silence.
Out of the glut of enigmas there was but one thing a large mattress upon the floor that he could recognize without a diagram. "Your caretaker sleeps here, I perceive." Klinker laughed. "Look around you, Doc. Take a good gaze." Doc obeyed. Klinker picked up a "sneaker" from the floor and hurled it with deadly precision at a weight-and-pulley across the room. "There's your medicine, Doc!"
Buck Klinker, returning from some stag devilry at the hour of two A.M., and attracted to the Scriptorium by the light under the door, found the little Doctor pacing the floor in his stocking feet, with the gas blazing and the shade up as high as it would go.
Klinker was six feet high, red-faced and friendly, and Queed preferred his conversation above any heard at Mrs. Paynter's table. It reminded him very much of his friend the yeggman in New York. What went on behind the door of the tiny Scriptorium the boarders could only guess.
"One hour a day exercise, and you do more work in twenty-four hours than you're doing now, besides feelin' one hundred per cent better all the time." Still Queed was silent. One hour a day! "Try it for only a month," said Klinker the Tempter. "I'll help you glad to do it I need the drill myself.
Nevertheless, he passed straight from it to another performance hardly less extraordinary. From his table drawer he produced a little memorandum book, and in it just below a diagram of a new chest-developing exercise invented last night by Klinker he jotted down the things that Fifi said a man must do to be like other men.
Klinker was chewing a tooth-pick; and either a tooth-pick lasted him a long time, or the number he made away with in a year was simply stupendous. "Ever see a gymnasier, Doc?" No; it seemed that the Doc had not. "We got one here. There's a big spare room behind the shop. Kind of a store-room it was, and the Mercuries have fitted it up as a gymnasier and athletic club.
Orange-stick in mouth, he went around like a museum guide, introducing the beloved apparatus to the visitor under its true names and uses, the chest-weights, dumb-*bells and Indian clubs, flying-rings, a rowing-machine, the horizontal and parallel bars, the punching-bag and trapeze. Klinker lingered over the ceremonial; it was plain that the gymnasier was very dear to him.
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