"You are not actually going to have the audacity to ask me to pay
three hundred and fifty thousand dollars on account of that poker?"

"If it was seven hundred thousand dollars, I'd take it with a calmness
that would surprise you. Pay up, or we'll turn off your gas."

"Turn it off and be hanged," I exclaimed as I emerged from the office,
tearing the bill to fragments. Then I went home; and grasping that
too lavish poker, I approached the meter. It had registered another
million feet since the bill was made out; it was running up a score of
a hundred feet a minute; in a month I would have owed the gas company
more than the United States Government owes its creditors. So I beat
the meter into a shapeless mass, tossed it into the street and turned
off the gas inside the cellar.

Then I went down to the _Patriot_ office to persuade Major Slott
to denounce the fraud practiced by the company. While I was in the
editorial room two or three visitors came in. The first one behaved
in a violent and somewhat mysterious manner. He saluted the major by
throwing a chair at him. Then he seized the editor by the hair, bumped
his head against the table three or four times and kicked him. When
this exhilarating exercise was over, the visitor shook his fist very
close to the major's nose and said, "You idiot and outcast, if you
don't put that notice in to-morrow, I'll come round here and murder
you! Do you hear me?" Then he cuffed the major's ears a couple of
times, kicked him some more, emptied the ink-stand over his head,
poured the sand from the sand-box in the same place, knocked over the
table and went out. During all this time the major sat still with a
sickly kind of a smile upon his face and never uttered a word. When
the man left, the major picked up the table, wiped the ink and sand