TIM’S PARTNER.
BY AMANDA M. DOUGLAS.
“AIN’T got nothin’, Miss May, to set up a chap in housekeepin’—have you?”
“Housekeeping!” the young lady cried in surprise. “Why, surely, Tim, you are not thinking of—” and she paused, suddenly eying the figure before her from head to foot.
A strange, misshapen creature it was. He was barely eighteen, but he might have been twice that from the looks of his face, which was thin and sharp, and wrinkled about the eyes and forehead, surmounted by a shock of sandy brown hair, and thatched with an old gray felt hat going to tatters. A short, humpbacked figure, with a body out of all proportion to the pinched, slender legs. The arms were long, and finished by hands twice too large. A poor, pitiful object; yet there was something wistful and touching in the great brown eyes.
“Of gettin’ married? Was you goin’ to say that, Miss May? He! he! A gal would want a husband mighty bad, wouldn’t she, when she picked up such a crooked stick? The good Lord knows why he made me this way, I s’pose,” falling for a moment into a reflective mood. “But ’tain’t that, Miss May. I’ve got a room of old Mother Budd, and a stove, and a mattress, and now I’ve taken a pardner—Jerry; but you don’t know nothin’ ’bout him. He’s a little chap what’s had a drunken father all his life, and has to get about on two crutches—worse’n me, a good sight,” looking down with pride on his thin legs and substantial feet. “And now his father’s sent up to the Island, ’nd he had no place to go to. So we’ve set up together. He’s smart in some ways, is Jerry—kin sew like a gal, and cook, and we’ll get along just jolly. Only if we had some dishes and things. You see we have to pay a dollar a week in advance, for old Mother Budd’s sharp at a bargain, lookin’ out for tricks. Then I bought some coal an’ wood, an’ that took about all my spare capital.” He gave a sort of humorous grin, as he said “capital.”
He had shoveled off the snow and cleaned out the gutter to perfection. Miss May had paid him thirty cents. After a moment she said,—