“All right. I'll attend to you in a moment. Glad to see you, Mr. McGaw,” said Babcock, rising from the keg, and looking over his bookkeeper's shoulder.
Lathers's friend proved to be a short, big-boned, square-shouldered Irishman, about forty years of age, dressed in a once black broadcloth suit with frayed buttonholes, the lapels and vest covered with grease-spots. Around his collar, which had done service for several days, was twisted a red tie decorated with a glass pin. His face was spattered with blue powder-marks, as if from some quarry explosion. A lump of a mustache dyed dark brown concealed his upper lip, making all the more conspicuous the bushy, sandy-colored eyebrows that shaded a pair of treacherous eyes. His mouth was coarse and filled with teeth half worn off, like those of an old horse. When he smiled these opened slowly like a vise. Whatever of humor played about this opening lost its life instantly when these jaws clicked together again.
The hands were big and strong, wrinkled and seamed, their rough backs spotted like a toad's, the wrists covered with long spidery hairs.
Babcock noticed particularly his low, flat forehead when he removed his hat, and the dry, red hair growing close to the eyebrows.
“I wuz a-sp'akin' to me fri'nd Mister Lathers about doin' yer wurruk,” began McGaw, resting one foot on a pile of barrow-planks, his elbow on his knee. “I does all the haulin' to the foort. Surgint Duffy knows me. I wuz along here las' week, an' see ye wuz put back fer stone. If I'd had the job, I'd had her unloaded two days befoore.”
“You're dead right, Dan,” said Lathers, with an expression of disgust. “This woman business ain't no good, nohow. She ought to be over her tubs.”
“She does her work, though,” Babcock said, beginning to see the drift of things.
“Oh, I don't be sayin' she don't. She's a dacint woman, anough; but thim b'ys as is a-runnin' her carts is raisin' h—ll all the toime.”
“And then look at the teams,” chimed in Lathers, with a jerk of his thumb toward the dock—“a lot of staggering horse-car wrecks you couldn't sell to a glue-factory. That big gray she had a-hoistin' is blind of an eye and sprung so forrard he can't hardly stand.”
At this moment the refrain of a song from somewhere near the board fence came wafting through the air,—