"Is it a goot von? Stop a minute"—— For the third time he removed the old red silk handkerchief. "Draw te bow across vonce. I know aboud your violin ven I hears you blay."
Bob tucked the instrument under his chin and drew a full, clear, resonant tone.
The watery eyes glistened.
"Yes, I take your violin ant te money," in a decided tone. "You know 'em, ant I tink you loafe 'em too."
The subtle flattery of this last touch was exquisitely done. The man was an artist.
Bob reached for a pad, and, with the remark that he was wanted in court or he would go to his house with him, wrote an order, sealed it, and laid three ten-dollar bills on the table.
I felt that nothing now could check Bob. Whatever I might say or do would fail to convince him. "I know how hard a road can be and how sore one's feet can get," he would perhaps say to me, as he had often done before when we blamed him for his generosities.
The man balanced the letter on his hand, reading the inscription in a listless sort of way, picked up the instrument, looked it all over carefully, flecked off some specks of dust from the finger-board, laid the violin on the office table, thrust the soiled rag into his pocket, caught up the money, and without a word of thanks closed the door behind him.
"Bob," I said, the man's absolute ingratitude and my friend's colossal simplicity irritating me beyond control, "why in the name of common sense did you throw your money away on a sharp like that? Didn't you see through the whole game? That note was written by himself. Corunden never saw that fiddle in his life. You can buy a dozen of them for five dollars apiece in any pawn-shop in town."
Bob looked at me with that peculiar softening of the eyelids which we know so well. Then he said thoughtfully: "Do you know what it is to be stranded in a strange city with not a cent in your pocket, afraid to look a policeman in the face lest he run you in? hungry, unwashed, not a clean shirt for weeks? I don't care if he is a fraud. He sha'n't go hungry if I can help it."