His voice was low but it had a peculiar carrying quality. His rugged face was deeply lined, and I noticed a little gray in his hair. He was smiling straight down into the eyes of his companion, a much younger man, thin and poorly dressed, whose face looked drawn and tired.
"When I was your age," I heard Dillon remark, "I got into just the same kind of a snarl." And he began telling about it. A frightfully technical story it was, full of engineer slang that was Greek to me, but I saw the younger man listen absorbed, his thin lips parting in a smile. I saw him come out from under his worries, I saw his chief watching him, pulling him out.
"All right, Jim," he ended. "See what you can do."
"Say, Chief, just you forget this, will you?" the other said intensely. "Don't give it a thought. It's go'n' to be done!"
"It's forgotten."
Another easy smile at his man, and then Eleanore's father turned to us. I could feel him casually take me in.
"The thing I liked most in that sketch of yours," he was saying a few minutes later, when our boat was on her course, "was the way you listed that Dutchman's cargo. 'One baby carriage—to Lahore.' A very large picture in five little words. I can see that Hindu baby now—being wheeled in its carriage to Crocodile Park and wondering where the devil this queer new wagon came from. I've been nosing around these docks for years, but I missed that part of 'em right along—that human part—till you came along with your neat writer's trick. 'One baby carriage—to Lahore.' You ought to be proud, young man, at your age to have written one sentence so long that it goes half way around the world."
As he talked in that half bantering tone I tried to feel cross, but it wouldn't do. That low voice and those gray eyes were not making fun of me, they were making friends with me, they were so kindly, curious, so open and sincere. Soon he had lighted a cigar and was telling Eleanore gravely just how she ought to run her boat.
"Why be so busy about it?" he asked.
"Oh, you be quiet!" she replied, as she sharply spun her wheel. Like an automobile in a crowded street our craft was lurching its way in short dashes in and out of the rush hour traffic. The narrow East River was black with boats. Ferries, tugs and steamers seemed to be coming at us from every side. Now with a leap we would be off, then abruptly churning the water behind us we would hold back drifting, watching our chance for another rush. Eleanore's face was glowing now, her hat was off, her neck was tense—and her blue-gray eyes, wide open, fixed on the chaos ahead, were shining with excitement. Now and then a long curling wisp of her hair would get in her eyes and savagely she would blow it back. And her lank quiet father puffed his cigar, with his gray eyes restfully on her. "The serenity of her," he murmured to me.