"Blew in here one night las' month, purty nigh froze—out of a job and hungry. De Missus got soft on him—she's dat kind, ye know. Yer oughter seen him eat! Well, I guess! Been in a littingrapher's shop—ye kin tell by his fingers. Say, Bowser, show de gentleman yer fingers."
Bowser held them up as quickly as if the order had come down the barrel of a Winchester.
"And ye oughter see him draw. Gee! if I could draw like him I wouldn't do nothin' else. But I ain't never had nothin' in my head like that. A feller's got to have sumpin' besides school-larnin' to draw like him. Now you're a sketch-artist, and know. Why, he drawed de Sheriff last Sunday sittin' in de porch huggin' his bitters, to de life. Say, Bowse, show de gentleman de picter ye drawed of de Sheriff."
Bowser slipped his hand under the bar and brought out a charcoal sketch of a black mustache surrounded by a pair of cheeks, a treble chin, and two dots of eyes.
"Kin hear him speak, can't ye? And dat ain't nothin' to de way he kin print. Say, Bowse"—the intimacy grew as the young man's talents loomed up in Muffles's mind—"tell de gentleman what de boss said 'bout yer printin'."
"Said I could print all right, only there warn't no more work." There was a modesty in Bowser's tone that gave me a better opinion of him.
"Said ye could print all right, did he? Course he did—and no guff in it, neither. Say, Missus"—and he turned to his wife, who had just come in, the youngest child in her arms. She weighed twice as much as Muffles—one of those shapeless women with a kindly, Alderney face, and hair never in place, who lets everything go from collar to waist-line.
"Say, Missus, didn't de Sheriff say dat was a perfec' likeness?" And he handed it to her.
The wife laughed, passed it back to Muffles and, with a friendly nod to me, kept on to the kitchen.
"Bar-room ain't no place for women," Muffles remarked in an undertone when his wife had disappeared. "Dat's why de Missus ain't never 'round. And when de kids grow up we're goin' to quit, see? Dat's what de Missus says, and what she says goes!"