At night a lighted lamp rested on a bracket above the table, and on this particular night Jack’s coat hung beside the lamp.
The main entrance door of the cabin was at the kitchen end, and opened inward. There was also a door at the bedroom end of the cabin, securely locked and bolted. The door in the partition between the two rooms was in line with the other doors, and had a small pane of glass, six by six inches, in the upper panel.
On this eventful night Dorothy was seated on the chair, her head resting on her arms on the end of the table, indifferently watching Jack. He, with a cigar in his mouth and in his gray shirtsleeves, was standing in front of the table wiping a dishpan, the last of the evening cleanup. Putting the pan away under the shelf, he hung the dishcloth beside its mate on the line, and carefully stretched it out to dry. Then, as he sat down on the stool at the end of the table opposite Dorothy, a smile of satisfaction stole over his dark, swarthy face when he surveyed the result of his work—a clean and tidy appearing room.
“Eesa be so nice-a da clean. So bute-a da corner. Eesa like-a da fine-a house. Tar-rah-rah! Tink-a eesa get-a da fote-da-graph of eet a made. Put eem in-a Sunny da paper. Eh-a da Daize! What a use-a da tink? Eh!”
Dorothy raised her head and looked at him in offended, childish dignity.
“My name is not A da Daize; it is Dorothy!”
“Eesa like-a da Daize a bet! What youse-a tink? Eesa nicey da room, eh Daize?”
Then the child indifferently looked at the corner with its stove and adjuncts. She had been detained in his company now—for four days, and, childlike, was intuitively quick in interpreting the broken, stumbling Dago utterances of Jack.
“It is not so nice as our kitchen,” she naively replied. “But maybe the photo will make people think you are a good cook!”
“A da cook-a!—naw, eesa be damn! Turnoppsis! Carrotsis! Cababbages! Black-a da boots”—