“That’s all right,” he exclaimed. “That’s all right. He ain’t had it easy, you know. Scrubbing spittoons is enough to take the polish off any guy. I’m telling you he’s there. Forty ways. You’ll see, bo. You’ll see.”
“I’m waiting,” I said.
“Keep right on,” Sheener advised me. “Keep right on. The old stuff is there. It’ll show. Take it from me.”
I laughed at him. “If I get you,” I said, “you’re looking for something along the line of ‘Noblesse Oblige.’ What?”
“Cut the comedy,” he retorted. “I’m telling you, the old class is there. You can’t keep a fast horse in a poor man’s stable.”
“Blood will tell, eh?”
“Take it from me,” said Sheener.
It will be perceived that Evans had in Sheener not only a disciple; he had an advocate and a defender. And Sheener in these rôles was not to be despised. I have said he was a newsboy; to put it more accurately, he was in his early twenties, with forty years of experience behind him, and with half the newsboys of the city obeying his commands and worshiping him like a minor god. He had full charge of our city circulation and was quite as important, and twice as valuable to the paper, as any news editor could hope to be. In making a friend of him, Evans had found an ally in the high places; and it became speedily apparent that Sheener proposed to be more than a mere friend in name. For instance, I learned one day that he was drawing Evans’s wages for him, and had appointed himself in some sort a steward for the other.
“That guy wouldn’t ever save a cent,” he told me when I questioned him. “I give him enough to get soused on, and I stick five dollars in the bank for him every week. I made him buy a new suit of clothes with it last week. Say, you wouldn’t know him if you run into him in his glad rags.”
“How does he like your running his affairs?” I asked.