“What’s wrong with show boats?”
“Everything, and more, too. A lot of loose-living worthless scallywags, men and women. Scum, that’s what. Trollops!” Parthy could use a good old Anglo-Saxon word herself, on occasion.
Captain Andy made frantic foray among the whiskers. He clawed like a furious little monkey—always the sign of mental disturbance in him. “No more scum than your own husband, Mrs. Hawks, ma’am. I used to be with a show-boat troupe myself.”
“Pilot, yes.”
“Pilot be damned.” He was up now and capering like a Quilp. “Actor, Mrs. Hawks, and pretty good I was, too, time I was seventeen or eighteen. You ought to’ve seen me in the after-piece. Red Hot Coffee it was called. I played the nigger. Doubled in brass, too. I pounded the bass drum in the band, and it was bigger than me.”
Magnolia was enchanted. She sprang up, flew round to him. “Were you really? An actor? You never told me. Mama, did you know? Did you know Papa was an actor on a show boat?”
Parthy Ann rose in her wrath. Always taller than her husband, she seemed now to tower above him. He defied her, a terrier facing a mastiff.
“What kind of talk is this, Andy Hawks! If you’re making up tales to tease me before the child I’m surprised at you, that thought nothing you could do would ever surprise me again.”
“It’s the truth. The Sunny South, she was called. Captain Jake Bofinger, owner. Married ten times, old Jake was. A pretty rough lot we were in those days, let me tell you. I remember time we——”
“Not another word, Captain Hawks. And let me tell you it’s a good thing for you that you kept it from me all these years. I’d never have married you if I’d known. A show-boat actor!”