Occasionally a rich reward would fall to the enterprising "Dabber."
"Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer"
W. C. Scully
I may be in as great a hurry as you can imagine; I may be but a poor nervous wreck already, as I am; I may be quivering to be up and away from there, but he dabs me with his towel-he dabs me until reason totters on her throne-sometimes just a tiny tot, as the saying goes, or it may be that the whole cerebral structure is involved-and then when he is apparently all through the Demoniac Dabber comes back and dabs me one more fiendish, deliberate and premeditated dab, making nine hundred and seventy-five dabs in all.
"Cobb's Anatomy"
Irvin S. Cobb