Mike merely turned his head toward Cockney and then turned it away again.
CHAPTER II
When the young man to whom Mike had extended kindness passed from the wicket, having agreed to tend cattle across the Atlantic for the sum of fifteen shillings, he found that he had already been christened. Perhaps his lack of diffidence in signing his name in the book which was turned round to him by the clerk, after the quiet discussion of terms was over, had suggested the new name to Mike.
"That's right, Scholar," he said.
"How much are you going to get?" asked the Inquisitive One, jumping forward, left shoulder advanced, and thrusting his face close to Scholar.
"He's after getting as much as you!" said Mike. "Don't you be telling him, Scholar, or he'll be running back to the wicket and saying: 'I want as much as the other feller there.'"
The Inquisitive One contented himself by looking at Mike's boots, trousers and belt, torn waistcoat, shirt, and black-and-white scarf, briefly at his face, and then, turning about, executed a heel and toe movement of right foot and left foot alternately, looking at the others and inclining his head towards Mike, in a kind of silent, noncommittal: "You observe?" Mike, too, observed, as his slight drawing erect signified, the slight toss of his chin, a dismissing toss, somewhat leonine. Then his eye rested on the youth in the long coat, and disapproval was in his eye. He had no objection to cattlemen in big hats from "beyant," who had come down in the cars with cattle, continuing across the Atlantic. He had no objection to other young men in big hats, who had not come down with cattle, but who wanted to cross the Atlantic. But that heavy, stolid, long-coated, legginged, spectacled lout seemed to him an indignity thrust upon them. He studied him a long while, with his weight now upon left foot, right advanced, toe tapping the cobbles, anon shifting weight to his right foot, leaning back, left foot advanced and left shoulder almost in a fighting attitude. The man in the long coat did not seem to be one of them. He might be going over this way simply to save money, not because he was hard up. It was different with the short-nosed man in the old soiled khaki; he did not seem to be by any means on his uppers, but he looked as one to whom all this was part of the day's work. His arrival had shown more clearly that Scholar might not be typical of men from "beyant," or "the Great Plains where the cattle comes from," despite his hat, but Scholar still remained not anathema; he was brown with the sun and the open air, and he had that touch of vagabondage that made him welcome although an outsider. He had come into their midst with an air of "If you don't mind, boys," but that long-coated, and leggined, and spectacled one didn't come in at all; he was just there. Mike had to ask the opinions of the others at this stage.
"What do you think of that?" he said quietly. "Is that a Jonah? Don't like the look of it. Looks a Jonah."
Long Jack's partner, whose name was Johnnie, and who had a way of varying the double-shuffling to the mouth-organ by striking belligerent attitudes at the others and making feints at them with a fist, paused in his mixture of double-shuffle and pugilistic rehearsal, to look at the subject of Mike's doubt.