“My studio ’s there now;” giving impressive accent to the word.
All the while these few words were passing he scrutinized me with unconcealed curiosity, puzzled, as well he might be, by my dress and equipment. Finally, after I had tied Kaweah to a tree and seated myself by the easel, and after he had absently rubbed some raw sienna into his little store of white, he softly ventured: “Was you looking out a ditch?”
“No,” I replied.
He neatly rubbed up the white and sienna with his “blender,” unconsciously adding a dash of Veronese green, gazed at my leggings, then at the barometer, and again meeting my eye with a look as if he feared I might be a disguised duke, said in slow tone, with hyphens of silence between each two syllables, giving to his language all the dignity of an unabridged Webster, “I would take pleasure in stating that my name is Hank G. Smith, artist;” and, seeing me smile, he relaxed a little, and, giving the blender another vigorous twist, added, “I would request yours.”
Mr. Smith having learned my name, occupation, and that my home was on the Hudson, near New York, quickly assumed a familiar me-and-you-old-fel’ tone, and rattled on merrily about his winter in New York spent in “going through the Academy,”—a period of deep moment to one who before that painted only wagons for his livelihood.
Storing away canvas, stool, and easel in a deserted cabin close by, he rejoined me, and, leading Kaweah by his lariat, I walked beside Smith down the trail toward Copples’s.
He talked freely, and as if composing his own biography, beginning:
“California-born and mountain-raised, his nature soon drove him into a painter’s career.” Then he reverted fondly to New York and his experience there.
“Oh, no!” he mused in pleasant irony, “he never spread his napkin over his legs and partook French victuals up to old Delmonico’s. ’Twasn’t H. G. which took her to the theatre.”
In a sort of stage-aside to me, he added, “She was a model! Stood for them sculptors, you know; perfectly virtuous, and built from the ground up.” Then, as if words failed him, made an expressive gesture with both hands over his shirt-bosom to indicate the topography of her figure, and, sliding them down sharply against his waistband, he added, “Anatomical torso!”