Instead of appreciating that suggestion he was annoyed with me, so I ventured something else.
"How would it be for you to beat a policeman on the helmet?"
"Why don't you think of something for yourself to do?" he said, somewhat sourly.
"All right," I returned. "I'm willing to do my share. I will poison you and get arrested for it."
"If you do that," he criticized, "who will make the pictures?"
I saw that he was in a humor to find fault with anything I proposed, so I let him ramble on. He had a regular orgy of imaginary disaster, running all the way from train wrecks, in which I was killed and he was saved only to have the bother and expense of shipping my remains home, to fires in which my notebooks were burned up, leaving on his hands a lot of superb but useless drawings.
After a time he suggested that we make up a list of the things we had been warned of. I did not wish to do it, but, acting on the theory that fever must run its course, I agreed, so we took paper and pencil and began. It required about two hours to get everything down, beginning with _Aches_, _Actresses_, _Adenoids_, _Alcoholism_, _Amnesia_, _Arson_, etc., and running on, through the alphabet to _Zero weather_, _Zolaism_, and _Zymosis_.
After looking over the category, my companion said:
"The trouble with this list is that it doesn't present things in the order in which they may reasonably be expected to occur. For instance, you might get zymosis, or attempt to write like Zola, at almost any time, yet those two dangers are down at the bottom of the list. On the other hand, things like actresses, alcoholism, and arson seem remote. We must rearrange."
I thought it wise to give in to him, so we set to work again. This time we made two lists: one of general dangers--things which might overtake us almost anywhere, such as scarlet fever, hardening of the arteries, softening of the brain, and "road shows" from the New York Winter Garden; another arranged geographically, according to our route. Thus, for example, instead of listing Elbert Hubbard under the letter "H," we elevated him to first place, because he lives near Buffalo, which was our first stop.
I didn't want to put down Hubbard's name at all--I thought it would please him too much if he ever heard about it. I said to my companion: