He guided her to a bench, and they sat down three feet apart.
“Go on tell me, now,” he pleaded.
“Well, it’s railroad work—building railroads, you know. A gypo man’s a little contractor—you know what I mean—not a little man, but a little contractor that don’t amount to much. He’s got a little outfit and he takes sub-contracts from the big fellows. My father’s a gypo man, and they call the camp of a man like him a gypo camp. I’m a gypo queen.”
“What’s that?”
“Well,” she amplified, “a gypo queen is a gypo man’s daughter. That’s easy. Sometimes they call a gypo man a shanty man, and then his camp is a shanty camp and his daughter is a shanty queen. It’s all the same. It’s hobo lingo.”
“What d’ye do down there?”
“Well, I work some—a little. And my mother teaches me. She’s well educated. You see, there isn’t much chance for me to go to regular school, as we hardly ever stay in one place longer than three months. Then sometimes my mother lets me come up here to skate. Sometimes I drive horses on a slip, too. Do you know what that is?”
Joshua shook his head.
“Well, it’s just a dirt scraper. When you load it they call it sticking pigs. It’s lots of fun. And sometimes it’ll flip up and jerk out o’ your hands, and you lose your load and all. I can drive pretty well. We’re almost through on the job we’re on now, and then Pa says we’re going West. We’ve been on the double-track job, you know—working just out o’ town.”
“I’m on my way West, too,” Joshua informed her importantly.