Chapter 23 - Page 2

believed the average
man dreaded tooth-pulling more than amputation, and that he would yell
quicker under the former operation than he would under the latter. The
philosopher Harris said that the average man would not yell in either
case if he had an audience. Then he continued:

"When our brigade first went into camp on the Potomac, we used to be
brought up standing, occasionally, by an ear-splitting howl of anguish.
That meant that a soldier was getting a tooth pulled in a tent. But the
surgeons soon changed that; they instituted open-air dentistry. There
never was a howl afterward--that is, from the man who was having the
tooth pulled. At the daily dental hour there would always be about five
hundred soldiers gathered together in the neighborhood of that dental
chair waiting to see the performance--and help; and the moment the
surgeon took a grip on the candidate's tooth and began to lift, every
one of those five hundred rascals would clap his hand to his jaw and
begin to hop around on one leg and howl with all the lungs he had!
It was enough to raise your hair to hear that variegated and enormous
unanimous caterwaul burst out! With so big and so derisive an audience
as that, a suffer wouldn't emit a sound though you pulled his head off.
The surgeons said that pretty often a patient was compelled to laugh, in
the midst of his pangs, but that had never caught one crying out, after
the open-air exhibition was instituted."

Dental surgeons suggested doctors, doctors suggested death, death
suggested skeletons--and so, by a logical process the conversation
melted out of one of these subjects and into the next, until the topic
of skeletons raised up Nicodemus Dodge out of the deep grave in my
memory where he had lain buried and forgotten for twenty-five years.
When I was a boy in a printing-office in Missouri, a loose-jointed,
long-legged, tow-headed, jeans-clad countrified cub of about sixteen
lounged in one day, and without removing his hands from the depths of
his trousers pockets or taking off his faded ruin of a slouch hat, whose
broken rim hung limp and ragged about his eyes and ears like a bug-eaten
cabbage leaf, stared indifferently around, then leaned his hip against
the editor's table, crossed his mighty brogans, aimed at a distant
fly from a crevice in his upper teeth, laid him low, and said with
composure:

"Whar's the boss?"

"I am the boss," said the editor, following this curious bit of
architecture wonderingly along up to its clock-face with his eye.

"Don't want anybody fur to learn the business, 'tain't likely?"

"Well, I don't know. Would you like to learn it?"

"Pap's so po' he cain't run me no mo', so I want to