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“It seems like Windy and Emily were aiming to join out that season with a tent-show, but the deal fell through some way, and for the past few weeks Windy had been infesting a lodging-house for members of the profession over here on East Eleventh Street, and Emily had been in a livery barn down in Greenwich Village, just naturally eating her old India-rubber head off. Windy, having run low as to coin, wasn’t able to pay up Emily’s back board, and the liveryman was holding her for the bill.

“So, hearing some way that I’m fairly well upholstered with currency, he comes to me and suggests that if I’ll dig up what’s necessary to get Emily out of hock, he can snare a line of bookings in vaudeville, and we’ll all three go out on the two-a-day together, him as trainer and me as manager and Emily as the principal attraction. The proceeds is to be cut up fifty-fifty as between me and him.

“The notion don’t sound like such a bad one. That was back in the days when refined vaudeville was running very strongly to trained-animal acts and leading ladies that had quit leading but hadn’t found out about it yet. Nowadays them ex-queens of tragedy can go into the movies and draw down so much money that if they only get half as much as they say they’re getting, they’re getting almost twice as much as anybody would give ’em; but them times, vaudeville was their one best bet. And next to emotional actrines who could emosh twicet daily for twenty minutes on a stretch, without giving way anywhere, a good trained-animal turn had the call. It might be a troupe of educated Potomac shad or an educated ape or a city-broke Gila monster or a talking horse or what not. In our case ’twas Emily, the bull.

“First thing, we goes down to the livery-stable where Emily is spending the Indian summer and consuming half her weight in dry provender every twenty-four hours. The proprietor of this here fodder-emporium is named McGuire, and when I tells him I’m there to settle Emily’s account in full, he carries on as though entirely overcome by joyfulness–not that he’s got any grudge against Emily, understand, but for other good and abundant sufficiencies. He states that so far as Emily’s personal conduct is concerned, during her enforced sojourn in his midst, she’s always deported herself like a perfect lady. But she takes up an awful lot of room, and one of the hands is now on the verge of nervous prostration from overexertions incurred in packing hay to her, and, it seems she’s addicted to nightmares. She gets to dreaming that a mouse nearly an inch and a half long is after her,–all bulls is terrible afraid, you know, that some day a mouse is going to come along and eat ’em,–and when she has them kind of delusions, she cries out in her sleep and tosses around and maybe knocks down a couple of steel beams or busts in a row of box-stalls or something trivial like that. Then, right on top of them petty annoyances, McGuire some days previous has made the mistake of feeding Emily peanuts, which peanuts, as he then finds out, is her favourite tidbit.

“‘Gents,’ says McGuire to me and Windy Jordan, ‘I shore did make the error of my life when I done that act of kindness. I merely meant them peanuts as a special treat, but Emily figures it out that they’re the start of a fixed habit,’ he says. ‘Ever since then, if I forget to bring her in her one five-cent bag of peanuts per diem, per day, she calls personally to inquire into the oversight. She waits very patient and ladylike until about eleven o’clock in the morning, and if I ain’t made good by then, she just pulls up her leg hobble by the roots and drops in on me to find out what’s the meaning of the delay.