“Yes, lots of ’em. And I do chores—do more chores than tricks.”
“Do you get paid?”
“Not regular. I get my board and keep. I wish I could stay home with ma, and get some work to do in town. There’s four of us, and pa’s dead, so my uncle, he said he’d take me off ma’s hands.”
“I’d like to go with a show.”
“Would you?” cried the other. His nutlike face seemed to grow old, and he looked at Jim from under his long lashes. “Would you like sleeping out in the rain, picking up meals here and there, and going on day after day, no matter how you feel? If the old folks take the notion, that’s what happens to a fella. And then the being funny, that’s the worst. I hate to be funny just because folks have paid to see me that a-way.”
“That girl, is she funny?”
“Funny?” The dark boy puzzled over this quite a while. “I don’t know about funny. She’s queer! Her ma was queer too. Not a bit like the other women. She was good to me, and taught me out of books and talked to me about my manners. And she could make the people listen when she sang or danced, you bet!”
“Does that girl like the show?”
“No, I reckon not. It’s no place for a nice girl to be. But they’ll keep her. The people just clap and clap when she does things, she’s so ’cute, someway. Those other women, they’re no good. It would make you sick to see them trying to be funny. And they’re always wanting everybody to wait on ’em. I tell you I’m tired of ’em, and so’s Zalie, I expect. She’ll just be a slave to them, that’s what she’ll be, and she’ll never get a good word out of ’em neither. I wisht she could stay here with your ma. If she could, then I’d clear out—run away and get a place in a mill or somewhere. I tell you, I don’t like drinking and roaming. It’s too much like being a tramp. Good folks like your pa and ma don’t think nothing of us, I can see that. And I—I don’t like it neither.”
He wrinkled up his narrow forehead in a heavy frown, and Jim frowned back as he tried to see things the way the boy was seeing them. He thought the boy very clever, and he knew that what he said was true about the difference between people like his father and mother, and the people like Sisson and his companions.