Tales From Gavagan's Bar by L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt Page B

books—really an infliction. You haven't any idea of what pests they can be when they get out of hand.
     
                  Now, wait a minute [he held up a hand toward Witherwax, whose attitude indicated speech]. I know what you're going to say. You're going to ask why I didn't get an exterminator or a cat. Well, I live alone and do a good deal of traveling, so it would be no use trying to keep a cat. As for the exterminator, I did get one; I got half a dozen, in relays. They came around once a week with traps and mouse seed, which they scattered over the floor until it crunched underfoot, and I suppose they did kill a lot of mice. At least the place smelt like it. But the mice kept coming back.
     
                  The trouble was that Fairfield restaurant; it was a regular breeding-ground for them. You know the chain is owned by an old girl named Conybeare, Miss Gwen Conybeare. Like a good many other maiden ladies who have all the money they need and more time than they know what to do with, she fell for one of those Indian sects. You know, with meetings in dimly lighted rooms and a prophet with a towel around his head. I suppose it's her business how she wants to spend her time and money; but this particular religion had a feature that made it my business, too. Her teacher convinced her that it was wrong to take life—not human life, but life of any kind, just as in India, where a man will get rid of a louse by picking it off himself and putting it on someone else.
     
                  She gave absolute orders that no death was to occur in a Fairfield restaurant and wouldn't allow an exterminator on the premises. So you see that as fast as I got rid of the mice in my apartment, a new supply came up from below; and I had a real problem.
     
                  This Abaris person naturally couldn't know that. When I said I needed a magician to get the mice out of my place, he looked at me with those vertical-appearing pupils and made a kind of noise in his throat that I swear gave me the shivers all through. [Murdoch shivered again and gulped from his Zombie.] I felt as though he were going to hypnotize me, or make my drink jump back into the bottle, like Jeffers's, and so before anything like that could happen, I began to explain that it wasn't a joke. As soon as I got to the part about Miss Conybeare, he smiled all across his face—he has very full, red lips—and made me a kind of bow.
     
                  "My dear young man," he said, "if it is a matter of a psychosophist, I should ask nothing better than the opportunity to assist you. They are the most repulsive of existing beings. Let me see—ha, I will provide you with the king of all the cats, and mouse corpses will litter the doorstep of Fairfields."
     
                  I explained that the king of the cats wouldn't do me much more good than the crown prince, because of my traveling.
     
                  He put a hand up to his mouth and spoke from underneath it. "Hm, hm," he said. "That makes it more difficult, but the project is a worthy one, and I will not willingly abandon it. I will lend you my dragon."
     
                  I laughed, thinking that Abaris was a much cleverer man than he looked, to have turned a mild joke around on me in that fashion. But he didn't laugh back.
     
                  "It is a very young dragon," he said, "hatched from an egg presented to me by my old friend, Mr. Sylvester. As nearly as I can determine, I am the first person to raise one from the egg, so I must ask you to take particularly good care of it, as I wish to present a report at the next meeting of the Imperial Society."
     
                  I thought he was carrying the joke so far that it strained a bit, so I said of course I would take the best of care of his dragon; and if it wearied of a diet of mice, I'd be glad to see that it was provided with a beautiful