Whether, if it hadn’t been for Billy’s new jack-knife, he and Thomas Murphy would have become friends, no one can say. It seems very probable that something would have made them like each other.
Sitting on a high stool to check time or in a chair to watch the great door had grown so monotonous that Tom really needed to have somebody to talk to.
Then there wasn’t any boy in the mill for Billy to get acquainted with; and Billy saw Tom oftener than he saw any of the other men. So it seems very natural that Billy and Tom should have become friends.
If they hadn’t, things wouldn’t have turned out just as they did; and whatever else might have happened, it was really the jack-knife that brought them together.
Billy had been in the mill about two weeks when, one morning, just as Tom was finishing making a mark after Uncle John’s name, snap went the point of his pencil.
Billy heard it break, and saw Tom put his hand into his pocket. Billy knew, from Tom’s face, before he drew his hand out, that there wasn’t any knife in his pocket.
So Billy put his dinner pail down, and pulling his knife out by the chain, said quickly:
“I’ll sharpen your pencil, Mr. Murphy.”
Billy had been practicing on sharpening pencils. He worked so fast that the men behind had hardly begun to grumble before the pencil was in working order, and the line began to move on again.
Though he did not know it, Billy had done something more than merely to sharpen Tom’s pencil. When he said, “Mr. Murphy,” he waked up something in Tom that Tom himself had almost forgotten about.