“Very well, Tommy,” said the agent, “you wait outside and we will see what can be done.”
“Well,” began the roadmaster, when the august body had reconvened, “if ye’s fellies wants to open a kindergarden, ye kin do it, but mind, I tell ye, it’s agin me judgment t’ put a lad like little Jack Connor watchin’ a bridge o’ nights.”
“I’ll be responsible fur Jack,” said McGuire, speaking for the first time; “th’ lad have the head uv a man above his slender shoulders, an’ Pat Connor’s boy can be trusted, do ye mind that?”
“And I’ll be responsible for Tommy McGuire,” said the agent, looking at the father of the freckled youth.
“He’s a tough kid that,” said the roadmaster, “wud all jew respect to his mother.”
“Leave him to me,” said the station-master, “he’s no whit tougher than I was at his age.”
When Tincher, the agent’s under-study, went out to look for Tommy, to apprise him of what he had overheard, the boy was not to be seen. Of course he could not be expected to sit quietly in the sun for nearly an hour, and he had not. He had climbed to the top of the grain elevator, he had mixed salt with U. P. Burns’s tobacco, and pinned a “lost” notice to his father’s coat that hung on the handle-bar of the hand car. Then he had scattered shelled corn for the miller’s pigs. He had discovered the agent’s marking pot, and was now lying flat on his stomach, reaching over the edge of the platform, making zebras of all the white pigs in the drove.
The widow laughed and cried when Tommy told her how it had all been arranged, and Tommy’s mother, to his surprise, actually kissed him. Even Denis McGuire was able to feel a pardonable pride in the boy. Mrs. Dutton said she was glad to “see th’ brat thryen to make suthen uv hissilf.” The priest promised to pray for him. “I’ll stand good for him here, father,” the agent had said to the priest, “if you’ll stand good hereafter,” and the priest had promised.
The first day was all too short for Tommy, though sad enough for Jack. By three o’clock in the afternoon the tank was full and the mule turned out to graze.