Richard Connell

All day long they kept Horace Nimms in a steel-barred cage. For twenty-one years he had perched on a tall stool in that cage, while various persons at various times poked things at him through a hole about big enough to admit an adult guinea pig.

Every evening round five-thirty they let Horace out and permitted him to go over to his half of a double-barreled house in Flatbush to sleep. At eight-thirty the next morning he returned to his cage, hung his two-dollar-and-eighty-nine-cent approximately Panama hat on a peg and changed his blue-serge-suit coat for a still more shiny alpaca.

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“One, two, three, bend! One, two, three, bend!” So barked the physical instructor, a bulgy man with muscles popping out all over him as if his skin had been stuffed with hard-boiled eggs.

Little Peter Mullaney oned, twoed, threed and bent with such earnest and whole-hearted violence that his blue eyes seemed likely to be jostled from their sockets and the freckles to be jarred loose from his thin, wiry arms.

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“He wouldn’t give a cent,” announced Mrs. Pottle, blotting up the nucleus of a tear on her cheek with the tip of her gloved finger. “‘Not one red cent,’ was the way he put it.”

“What did you want a red cent for, honey?” inquired Mr. Pottle, absently, from out the depths of the sporting page. “Who wouldn’t give you a red cent?”

“Old Felix Winterbottom,” she answered.

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Moistening the tip of his immaculate handkerchief, M. Alphonse Marie Louis Camille Pettipon deftly and daintily rubbed an almost imperceptible speck of dust from the mirror in Stateroom C 341 of the liner Voltaire of the Paris-New York Steamship Company, and a little sigh of happiness fluttered his double chins.

He set about his task of making up the berths in the stateroom with the air of a high priest performing a sacerdotal ritual.

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“Rather thirsty this morning, eh, Mr. Addicks?” inquired Cowdin, the chief purchasing agent. The “Mister” was said with a long, hissing “s” and was distinctly not meant as a title of respect.

Cowdin, as he spoke, rested his two square hairy hands on Croly Addicks’ desk, and this enabled him to lean forward and thrust his well-razored knob of blue-black jaw within a few inches of Croly Addicks’ face.

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