"I said that my choice of weapons is rapiers!" explains this guy. "And as a matter of fairness I must tell you that I have never met my equal with a sword!"
"Are you tryin' to kid me?" asks Scanlan. "What d'ye mean rapiers?"
"Is it possible you have never handled a blade?" exclaims the other guy, like he couldn't have heard it right.
"I used to, at that," admits the Kid, "but now I use a fork, except to pat down the potatoes!"
"So much the worse for you, then!" frowns the sword-swallower. "But you brought it upon yourself. Remember, to-morrow! And--" he stoops over and hisses, "--rapiers, without buttons!"
"Ha, ha!" yells the Kid. "Raypeers without buttons! How are you gonna hold 'em up?"
"Your ignorance is pathetic--not funny!" answers the other guy.
"I know," says the Kid. "I barely got through Yale!" He lays his arm on this guy's shoulder. "Are you on the level with this fight thing?" he asks him.
"I was never more in earnest in my life!" says the knife-thrower.
"Or nearer Heaven!" grins the Kid. "All right!" he goes on. "I'm game, if you are, only there's just one question I'd like to ask before the slaughter begins; don't _I_ get no say about the tools we're gonna use?"
This guy thinks for a minute and then nods his head.
"Very well!" he says. "I'll make the concession--an unheard-of thing in the code. What is your choice?"
"Pinochle!" yells the Kid. "I'll stake you to a hundred aces and beat you from here to Denver!"
"Ugh!" snorts the other guy--and castin' a sneer at both of us, he passes in the gate.
We went in after him, and the Kid tells me how he come to flatten this baby, which, from the card he give us, was J. Harold Cuthbert. The Kid says Harold stopped him outside the portals of Film City and asked him why no auto had met him at the train. Scanlan says he didn't know, but he had seen the mayor and two brass bands goin' down and hadn't Harold met 'em? Harold says he had not and he was gonna file a complaint about it, because he was the greatest movie actor that ever bawled out a director. With that, says the Kid, he reeled off the names of the pictures he had been featured in, and from the list he give out the only thing he wasn't featured in was "Microbes at Play," a educational film tore off by the company last year. The Kid asks him if he ever heard of Kid Scanlan, the shop girls' delight, who was bein' starred in a five-reeler called "Lay Off, MacDuff." Harold throwed out his chest and says he wrote it and practically made Scanlan by directin' it. At that the Kid tells him that he may be a movie star, but he looks like a liar to him. Harold makes a pass at him, and Scanlan hit him to see would he bounce. He didn't, and he was just comin' around when I blowed on the scene.