I made purty good time, and in a couple of days I was in Atlanta. I knowed the doctor must of gone back into some branch of the medicine game--the bottles told me that. Iknowed it must be something that he needed some special kind of bottles fur, too, or he wouldn't of had them shipped all that distance, but would of bought them nearer. I seen I was a dern fool fur rushing off and not inquiring what kind of bottles, so I could trace what he was into easier.
It's hard work looking fur a man in a good-sized town. I hung around hotel lobbies and places till I was tired of it, thinking he might come in. And I looked through all the office buildings and read all the advertisements in the papers. Then the second day I was there the state fair started up and I went out to it.
I run acrost a couple I knowed out there the first thing--it was Watty and the snake-charmer woman. Only she wasn't charming them now.
Her and Watty had a Parisian Models' show. Iast Watty where Dolly was. He says he don't know, that Dolly has quit him. By which I guess he means he has quit her. I ast where Reginald is, and the Human Ostrich. But from the way they answered my questions I seen I wasn't welcome none around there. I suppose that Mrs. Ostrich and Watty had met up agin somewheres, and had jest natcherally run off with each other and left their famblies. Like as not she had left poor old Reginald with that idiotic ostrich feller to sell to strangers that didn't know his disposition. Or mebby by now Reginald was turned loose in the open country to shift fur himself, among wild snakes that never had no human education nor experience; and what chancet would a friendly snake like Reginald have in a gang like that? Some women has jest simply got no conscience at all about their husbands and famblies, and that there Mrs. Ostrich was one of 'em.
Well, a feller can be a derned fool sometimes.
Fur all my looking around I wasted a lot of time before I thought of going to the one natcheral place--the freight depot of the road them bottles had been shipped by. I had lost a week coming down. But freight often loses more time than that.
And it was at the freight depot that I found him.
Tickled? Well, yes! Both of us.
"Well, by George," says he, "you're good for sore eyes."Before he told me how he happened not to of drownded or blowed away or anything he says we better fix up a bit. Which he meant I better.
So he buys me duds from head to heel, and we goes to a Turkish bath place and I puts 'em on. And then we goes and eats. Hearty.
"Now," he says, "Fido Cut-up, how did you find me?"*I told him about the bottles.
"A dead loss, those bottles," he says. "I wanted some non-refillable ones for a little scheme I had in mind, and I had to get them at a certain place --and now the scheme's up in the air and I can't use 'em."The doctor had changed some in looks in the year or more that had passed since I saw him floating away in that balloon. And not fur the better.
He told me how he had blowed clean acrost Lake Erie in that there balloon. And then when he got over land agin and went to pull the cord that lets the parachute loose it wouldn't work at first. He jest natcherally drifted on into the midst of nowhere, he said--miles and miles into Canada. When he lit the balloon had lost so much gas and was flying so low that the parachute didn't open out quick enough to do much floating. So he lit hard, and come near being knocked out fur good. But ----------*AUTHOR'S NOTE--Can it be that Danny struggles vaguely to report some reference to FIDUS ACHATES? that wasn't the worst of it, fur the exposure had crawled into his lungs by the time he found a house, and he got newmonia into them also, and like to of died. Whilst I was laying sick he had been sick also, only his'n lasted much longer.
But he tells me he has jest struck an idea fur a big scheme. No little schemes go fur him any more, he says. He wants money. Real money.
"How you going to get it?" I asts him.
"Come along and I'll tell you," he says. "We'll take a walk, and I'll show you how I got my idea."We left the restaurant and went along the brag street of that town, which it is awful proud of, past where the stores stops and the houses begins.
We come to a fine-looking house on a corner--a swell place it was, with lots of palms and ferns and plants setting on the verandah and showing through the windows. And stables back of it;and back of the stables a big yard with noises coming from it like they was circus animals there. Which I found out later they really was, kept fur pets.
You could tell the people that lived there had money.
"This," says Doctor Kirby, as we walked by, "is the house that Jackson built. Dr. Julius Jack-son--OLD Doctor Jackson, the man with an idea!
The idea made all the money you smell around here.""What idea?"
"The idea--the glorious humanitarian and philanthropic idea--of taking the kinks and curls out of the hair of the Afro-American brother,"says Doctor Kirby, "at so much per kink."
This Doctor Jackson, he says, sells what he calls Anti-Curl to the niggers. It is to straighten out their hair so it will look like white people's hair. They is millions and millions of niggers, and every nigger has millions and millions of kinks, and so Doctor Jackson has got rich at it. So rich he can afford to keep that there personal circus menagerie in his back yard, for his little boy to play with, and many other interesting things. He must be worth two, three million dollars, Doctor Kirby says, and still a-making it, with more niggers growing up all the time fur to have their hair un-kinked. Especially mulattoes and yaller niggers.
Doctor Kirby says thinking what a great idea that Anti-Curl was give him his own great idea. They is a gold mine there, he says, and Dr. Julius Jackson has only scratched a little off the top of it, but HEis going to dig deeper.
"Why is it that the Afro-American brother buys Anti-Curl?" he asts.
"Why?" I asts.