CHAPTER VIII
GRATITUDE IS A FLOWER
James lay in the shade of the butternut tree and smoked gloomily. He was well-shaved and his hair newly cut and carefully brushed, but his clothes were still the rags that had graced his muscular form since the dim, nearly forgotten long ago, when he had stolen them one lucky night from some back yard passed in the course of his travels.
He squinted at the sun through the tree tops and judged it to be about four. The Watermelon had evidently done no better or he would have turned up before. Mike, sprawled in the grass beside him, slept with the stentorian slumber of the corpulent. James kicked him.
"Aw, wake up," he growled. "I want your rare intelligence to unbosom me sorrowful and heavy heart to."
Mike yawned, stretched and sat up, pushing his shapeless hat to the back of his round hot head. He drew his sleeve across his streaming forehead and yawned and stretched again.
"You ought to relax, James," said he, cutting a square from the plug of tobacco that he carried carefully wrapped in a soiled piece of tinfoil. "Youse will have noivous prostration one of these days with the strenuous life youse leads. The modern hurry and worry is all wrong. Now, take me—"
"No one would take you, not even a kodak," sneered James, scowling before him moodily.
"The matter with you, James," said Mike, sticking the tobacco into his mouth with the blade of his knife, "the matter with you is youse are harboring and cultivating that green-eyed monster called jealousy. Youse are, in short, jealous of me young friend, the Watermillion."
"Aw, jealous of a kid! Who? Me? Not on your tin-type."