When he left, a few minutes later, Jane Ray gave him the sort of handshake, with her firm young hand closing with his in full reciprocity, which one man gives to another.
“I can’t thank you,” she said. “It was wonderfully done. But—do you mind telling?—you must have held many babies!”
How Black himself laughed then, his head thrown back, his white teeth gleaming. “Being a woman, that’s what you get out of it,” he said. “Yes—I’ve held every one I could ever get hold of. I like them a bit bigger than that—a regular armful. Poor ‘blamed little beggar’—as the Doctor called him! But he’ll be an armful some day. We’ll see to that.”
“You bet we will,” declared Tom, who had been lingering to get away with Black. “Night, Miss Ray. I’ll be around in the morning to help you move things back. Don’t you touch a darned thing till I come. Promise! I say, aren’t you grateful to me? I borrowed that baby, and brought him here, too. The attention I attracted was awful. I had about ten dozen street kids with me all the way. Maybe that wasn’t just as useful a stunt as standing up and saying things, under the Belgian flag—eh?”
She sent him her most adorable look. “Mr. Tom, you’re a trump. You have my deepest appreciation—and good-night!”
“I say,” said Tom, a minute later, when they were well away, “I call her some girl. She’s—she’s—well, she’s a regular fellow—and you know how I mean that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” replied Black, looking fixedly up the street, as if he saw there something which interested him very much. “I know how you mean that. I think you are—right. Tom, would you object to telling me what all those women meant about my holding that baby? How on earth did I hold it differently from the way any man would hold it?”
“Young Mrs. Germain told me,” said Tom, chuckling with glee, “that you held it in your left arm. They said nobody except an old hand would do that. To have your right free to do other things—see? I never understood about that before. I carried the kid on my right arm.”
“After this,” declared Robert McPherson Black, firmly, “if I ever have occasion to hold an infant in public, I shall do it with my right arm!”