“You see, there were two trees which grew close together near the royal palace.  One of these was his Majesty’s private drinking tree.  The other, as it chawnced, was a rubber tree.”

Curly deliberately removed his hat and placed it on his knee, wiping, as he did so, a brow dotted thick with moisture.  No one broke the silence.

“You will easily understand,” resumed the speaker, “that when the King of Gee-Whiz had chopped into the rubber tree with his little gold axe, drinking awfterwards a cupful of pure caoutchouc, it did not take him long to repent of his inadvertence.  The results were what I may call most extraordinary.  I should judge the rubber juice to have been of very high proof indeed.

“To be brief, I give you my word of honor, the King was turned into an absolutely elastic person on the spot!  When he stamped his foot he bounded into the air.  ‘He’s a regular bounder, anyway,’ said Sir Harry, who would always have his joke.  ‘And,’ said he to me, as I remember distinctly, ’if his conscience becomes elastic, we’re gone, the same as Cook and Morgenstern.’  Sir Harry was a great wit.

“Now, the more furious the King became, the more helpless he became as well.  He simply bounced up and down and around and about.  Reigning monarch, too—­lack of dignity—­all that sort of thing—­must have been most annoying to him.  We could do nothing to calm him.  In all my travels, I have never seen such a state of affairs; I haven’t, really.”

“Nor me neither,” said Billy Hudgens, sighing, “and I’ve kept bar from Butte to El Paso.”

“Then what happened?” demanded Curly.

“Everything that could happen,” said the other, bitterly.  “Lady Sophie and her maid, Sir Harry and the princess—­the entire household suite of the King of Gee-Whiz—­were mad enough to taste also of the juice of this rubber tree.  It had the same effect upon them!  I say to you, positively and truthfully, that then and there the island of Gee-Whiz was inhabited by the maddest population ever known in any possession of her Britannic Majesty.”

“Reckon they was a pretty lively bunch to hold,” suggested Curly; “but what happened next?”

“I am not quite clear as to all that transpired awfter that.  I know that I was the only sane man left on the island.”

“Then,” remarked Curly, with conviction, taking a huge chew off his plug, “then that must shore have been one hell of a island!”

But the narrator went on unmoved:  “I reproved the others, and they resented it.  There was a great battle with the natives one day, of which I remember but little.  I seem to have been left insensible on the field.  When I recovered, I saw dawncing off across the sea the figures of all these different persons except Sir Harry—­who, of course, was with me in the battle.  Sir Harry was still with me, quite sober at lawst, and quite dead, I do not know from what cause.  I was left alone.