"Oh, I'm just cogitating," I answered. "You look sick; anything the matter with you?—and, say, when you go into that kitchen, I wish you wouldn't chuck everything in the place on the floor for me to pick up."
"I picked 'em all up, Ben," was his meek reply.
I never could scold him, so I forgave him and invited him to sit down and have a smoke. He fairly jumped at the idea, and it pleased me to see him bite. I thought then how little Tescheron could know of this innocent blockhead, Jim Hosley, whose heart and brain traps were built on the open, sanitary order, with nothing concealed.
Jim continued fidgety and wide-awake as he took his seat near the table and the county papers. He squirmed on the cushions, smoked hard and complained of the tobacco, the weather, the police magistrates, his tight shoes, the careless washerwoman and a string of matters incidental to the world's work and its burdens that he had never mentioned before so long as I had lived with him, and that was pretty close to ten years. It was easy to see that this was no ordinary case. Several times I had suffered the same sort of misery; had looked for a soft seat and reposeful thoughts in vain. Jim had not noticed it.
A man who has been forty miles over a mountain road on an empty lumber wagon knows what thrills are. I could see that Jim was aboard and that the team had cut loose down hill, for his bones were fairly rattling with the vibrations from the bog hollows, "thank yer, mums," old stumps and disagreeable boulders. He needed help. He couldn't hang on much longer.
"Say, Ben, there was a little matter I wanted to speak to you about," said Jim, with the same uneasy manner in which he had rubbed all our household arrangements the wrong way and aroused the resentment of the frying-pan and its "pards" of the domestic range.
I at once began to talk about something I was reading, to let him down easy and to open him up wider, for I was anxious to burrow into the mystery and dig exploration shafts in all directions. As he seemed to close again, I allowed my comment to drool off into a hum, and then looked up short in a way to send his ideas from mark-time to a continuance of the procession.
"You know that young lady, Miss Tescheron—Miss Gabrielle Tescheron?" asked Jim, tossing his hair into windrows and looking straight away from me.
"Why, I know that lovely girl I've seen you with; is her name—"
"Yes, that's her name, and we're to be married."