Was this a proposition to rob the house and murder us in our beds? I looked at the wood-pile and at William. There was something about their intimate relations that had an honest look. I remembered the extensive garden that would have to be hoed in July.
"Where would you go from here?" I said.
"I don't know, sur. I'll be lookin' fer a job."
"Do you understand gardening and taking care of a horse and cow?"
"Yes, sur, I do that."
I had an impulse to ask him about his last job, but I checked it. It was a question that could lead to embarrassment. I would accept him on his demonstration, or not at all.
"So you want a summer job, at general farm-work?"
"Yes, sur, I do."
"Well, William, you've found one, right here."
Even after the lapse of a dozen years I cannot write of William without a tugging at the heart. We never knew his antecedents—never knew where behind the sky-line he had been concealed all those years before that morning when he appeared, pale and unannounced, at the well. We got the impression, as time passed, that he had once been married and that he had at some time been somewhere on a peach-farm. With the exception of certain brief intervals—of which I may speak later—he remained with us three years, and that was as much as we ever knew, for he talked little, and not at all of the past. His face value was certainly not much, and some of his habits could have been improved, but a more faithful and honest soul than William Deegan never lived.