“Naw suh,” Eph told him proudly. “Dis heah’s my arrangement, suh. I’ll manage. Lemme alone.”
The next week he brought ten dollars; and the next. But for two days of that second week he ate nothing. He admitted this, in the bleak dawn, when he stopped for a whispered colloquy with the stone figure of his old Colonel, at the Memorial.
“But dat ain’ no matter, suh,” he assured the inscrutable officer. “Dis ol’ coon don’ need tuh eat. Nothin’ but skin an’ bone, anyhow. Lawdy, suh, whut good is vittles tuh me?”
Cold had struck down on Boston in December; and it held and intensified as January came. Sometimes people, listening to Eph’s singing, thought the old man must be shivering where he sat upon the stones; and Ragan drove him away two or three nights and bade him warm himself. But each time Eph looked at him with such pitiful entreaty against this kindness that Ragan gave up. “Have it your own way, you old idiot,” he told Eph. “If you want to freeze, go ahead and freeze. But don’t look at a man like he’s kicked you....”
“Yas suh,” said Eph. “Thank’e kindly, suh.”
Neither Ragan, nor Eph’s friend, the lawyer, realized how serious the matter was. They found Eph stubbornly determined to hold his own course; they decided he would not otherwise be content; and Eph was but one figure in their crowded lives. They let him have his way.
Eph duly met his obligations in the first week of that cold January; he was at his post through the second week. On the appointed day, he went to make the payment....
The lawyer had good news for him. Jim Forrest’s mother wrote that Jim had won a commission in the training camp; he had won, by exceptional merit, a commission as Captain.
“You understand, Eph,” the attorney explained, “this means he’ll have a good salary, about two hundred dollars a month. So his mother can get along all right, now....”
Eph’s feet were shuffling on the floor in something that sounded very like a soft but jubilant hornpipe; he disregarded utterly the attorney’s word. “My man’s a captain, suh,” he chanted. “An’ I put him in where he c’ud be it. Same as if I ’uz a captain in de army, now....”