had a night or two up there. If you’d like to go up and pick out a
place, you can. You’ll find chalk in the side of the chimney where
there’s a brick wanting. You just take the chalk and–but of course
you’ve done it before.”
“Oh, no, I haven’t.”
“Why, of course you haven’t-what am I thinking of? Plenty of room on the
Plains without chalking, I’ll be bound. Well, you just chalk out a place
the size of a blanket anywhere on the tin that ain’t already marked off,
you know, and that’s your property. You and your bed-mate take turn-
about carrying up the blanket and pillows and fetching them down again;
or one carries them up and the other fetches them down, you fix it the
way you like, you know. You’ll like the boys, they’re everlasting
sociable–except the printer. He’s the one that sleeps in that single
bed-the strangest creature; why, I don’t believe you could get that man
to sleep with another man, not if the house was afire. Mind you, I’m not
just talking, I know. The boys tried him, to see. They took his bed out
one night, and so when he got home about three in the morning–he was on
a morning paper then, but he’s on an evening one now–there wasn’t any
place for him but with the iron-moulder; and if you’ll believe me, he
just set up the rest of the night–he did, honest. They say he’s
cracked, but it ain’t so, he’s English–they’re awful particular.
You won’t mind my saying that. You–you’re English?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. I could tell it by the way you mispronounce the words
that’s got a’s in them, you know; such as saying loff when you mean laff
–but you’ll get over that. He’s a right down good fellow, and a little
sociable with the photographer’s boy and the caulker and the blacksmith
that work in the navy yard, but not so much with the others. The fact
is, though it’s private, and the others don’t know it, he’s a kind of an
aristocrat, his father being a doctor, and you know what style that is–
in England, I mean, because in this country a doctor ain’t so very much,
even if he’s that. But over there of course it’s different. So this
chap had a falling out with his father, and was pretty high strung, and
just cut for this country, and the first he knew he had to get to work or
starve. Well, he’d been to college, you see, and so he judged he was all
right–did you say anything?”
“No–I only sighed.”
“And there’s where he was mistaken. Why, he mighty near starved. And I
reckon he would have starved sure enough, if some jour’ printer or other
hadn’t took pity on him and got him a place as apprentice. So he learnt
the trade, and then he was all right–but it was a close call. Once he
thought he had got to haul in his pride and holler for his father and–
why, you’re sighing again. Is anything the matter with you?–does my
clatter–”
“Oh, dear–no. Pray go on–I like it.”
“Yes, you see, he’s been over here ten years; he’s twenty-eight, now,
and he ain’t pretty well satisfied in his mind, because he can’t get
reconciled to being a mechanic and associating with mechanics, he being,
as he says to me, a gentleman, which is a pretty plain letting-on that
the boys ain’t, but of course I know enough not to let that cat out of
the bag.”
“Why-would there be any harm in it?”
“Harm in it? They’d lick him, wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t you? Of course
you would. Don’t you ever let a man say you ain’t a gentleman in this
country. But laws, what am I thinking about? I reckon a body would
think twice before he said a cowboy wasn’t a gentleman.”
A trim, active, slender and very pretty girl of about eighteen walked
into the room now, in the most satisfied and unembarrassed way. She was
cheaply but smartly and gracefully dressed, and the mother’s quick glance
at the stranger’s face as he rose, was of the kind which inquires what