The woman put her hand on the child's head, smoothed it softly, and looked up in the face of the man with the medal.
"And you can get no state-room, George?" she asked in a plaintive tone.
"State-room, Kitty! Why, we couldn't get a pillow. I tried to get a shake-down some'ers, but half these people won't get six feet of space to lie down in, let alone a bed."
"Well, I don't know what we're going to do. Freddie's got a raging fever; I can't hold him here in my arms all night."
Sam shifted his weight to the other foot and concentrated his camera. The man with the medal and the woman with the boy were evidently man and wife. Sam had no little Freddie of his own—no Kitty, in fact—not yet—no home really that he could call his own—never more than a month at a time. A Pullman lower or a third story front in a three-dollar-a-day hotel was often his bed, and a marble-top table with iron legs screwed to the floor of a railroad restaurant and within sound of a big-voiced gateman bawling out the trains, generally his board. Freddie looked like a nice boy, and she looked like a nice woman. Man was O. K., anyhow—didn't give medals of honor to any other kind. Both of them fools, though, or they wouldn't have brought that kid out——
Again the child turned its head and uttered a faint cry, this time as if in pain.
Sam freed his arm from the hip bone of the passenger on his left, and said in a sympathetic voice—unusual for Sam:
"Is this your boy?" The drummer was not a born conversationalist outside of trade matters, but he had to begin somewhere.
"Yes, sir." The woman looked up and a flickering smile broke over her lips. "Our only one, sir."