The girl’s eyes bulged with apprehension. “We don’t want no subscription papers for us, and if Miss Bentley sends her soup here I’ll water the flowers with it. We ain’t no Stonepasture poverty yet, to drink the dishwater outer By the Bridge kitchen. He can’t eat nothing but what I get and cook.”
“Now jest dry up, Emma Butte,” said Jim very gently; “old sheep Bentley with her soup and her weepin’ ain’t goin’ to come soothin’ and scratchin’ ’round this yard. Jarlsen left a little paper with me that fixes that. All that you’ve got to do is to practise your signature on his papers in the presence of a few old friends. He grabbed considerable ’fore he was taken,” said Jim sympathetically. Leaving the car, he walked nimbly down tracks. No one understands the Godsend news is, in a labouring community. Jim felt elated that he had lodged a man who had money to look after. This vicarious business transaction was the biggest in his life.
Then the undertaker called that evening. He made the same announcement. Small and sympathetic, he threw a cheerfulness into all his sombre doings. He was a rarely lovely man, and had as little jealousy as a sleeping child. He attended blast rites where he never made a penny, as faithfully as he did funerals whereby he supported himself and his friends.
His family were four striped cats.
He was extremely fond of prayers and hymns, and, consequently, women. The men never guessed it of him. They knew that he would lend money, but had not yet discovered that, had they been able to repeat a sacred stanza, they need not have repaid him.
Emma’s heart beat fast with gratitude when Jeremy Black kissed her. She felt all along that one of the women might have done so, and it added to her uneasiness about Quarry’s visiting, for he would look at her and smile, and then wag his shaggy head, as he had always done when he had been about the Tracks telling lies.
She held little, black-coated Jerry very close to her, as disappointed children hug the family cat or dog. The day before she had gone in to kiss Jarlsen, but his poor face was sore with scorch and his side was bruised from where the blast threw him. So she had spread her longing hands over him in realization that the women wouldn’t love the barber and that her man couldn’t see her sorrow.
Jeremy was immensely pleased with her. He came soon to the subject of the blast rite, and arranged it in his deprecating way, holding his barber’s brown hand against his side and calling her Jarlsen’s love names, but in a safe, motherly voice that made Emma sure she need not fear the women even if they saw her with him. “Now, Emma, you can’t get a regular preacher to pray over anything but a sure and cold corpse, so we’ll get Quarry to say the sermon, alludin’ to past virtues and the future crown. It’ll make things right with Quarry, who ain’t the Tracks’ darling just exactly, and I’ll take the prayers myself. Then the Polacks will fiddle and I’ll sing ‘The land beyond the sky’ and ‘Peace comes after pain’—that’s a nice song, perfectly novel, with three acts and a chorus. I won’t let on it has a chorus, for them Polacks is so insaturated with alcohol they might get things noisy.”
“But do speak good and loud,” said Emma, “for August might hear something to please him.”
“That’s right,” said Jerry, “don’t you lose your grit. You kin never tell how far a man will get beyond the blast with good nursing.”