DANNY'S OWN STORY BY DON MARQUIS TO MY ... - Pink Monkey

quiet kind of drunks on. Which Looey explains
is bound to come every so often. He don't do
nothing mean, but jest gets low-sperrited and
won't talk to no one. Then all of a sudden he will
go down town and walk up and down the main
streets, orderly, but looking hard into people's
faces, mostly women's faces. Oncet, Looey says,
they was big trouble over it. They was in a store
in a good-sized town, and he took hold of a woman's
chin, and tilted her face back, and looked at her
hard, and most scared her to death, and they was
nearly being a riot there. And he was jailed and
had to pay a big fine. Since then Looey always
follers him around when he is that-a-way.
Well, that night Doctor Kirby is too fur gone
fur us to have our show. He jest sets and stares
and stares at the fire, and his eyes looks like they
is another fire inside of his head, and he is hurting
outside and in. Looey and me watches him from
the shadders fur a long time before we turns in,
and the last thing I seen before I went to sleep was
him setting there with his face in his hands, staring,
and his lips moving now and then like he was talking
to himself.
The next day he is asleep all morning. But that
day he don't drink any more, and Looey says mebby
it ain't going to be one of the reg'lar pifflicated
kind. I seen Martha agin that day, too--twicet
I has talks with her. I told her about the doctor.
"Is he into a quest, do you think?" I asts her.
She says she thinks it is remorse fur some crime
he has done. But I couldn't figger Doctor Kirby
would of done none. So that night after the show
I says to him, innocent-like:
"Doctor Kirby, what is a quest?" He looks at
me kind of queer.
"Wherefore," says he, "this sudden thirst for
enlightenment?"