“I am ashamed to trouble you, sir,” he said, “but if you could help me to get any sort of a job in New York, or anywhere else, I’d be more thankful than I could tell you. I can afford to take almost any sort of a place where there’s a future, for I am pretty well ahead of the game financially, and I’ve earned my interest in this concern. And it’s in such shape now that Mr. Billings can get along without me.”
“But, my dear boy,” I said, “why do you want to go?”
Big Mitch frowned and fidgeted nervously; then he exploded.
“I’ll give it to you straight,” he said. “It’s that Penrhyn pup. When he first came here I thought I was just about the nicest little man on God’s footstool. I was as contented with myself as a basket of eggs. I knew it all. I was so sharp you could cut glass with me. I was the only real sport in the outfit. See? And I’d got a roving commission to jump on people’s necks. Well, you know what I was. And I liked myself. See?”
“But?” I began. “Arthur Penrhyn—”
“So did he! I don’t believe any one in the world was ever stuck on me before, but he was. That little ape hadn’t been here a week before he began to do everything he saw me do, and pretty soon he had me down so fine that he might have been my twin-brother, if we ever had such runts in our family. Well, I began to sour on the show. Understand? I could see for myself it wasn’t pretty. Well, one day I came around a corner, and there was that baboon sassing back to old man Billings. I was just going to pick him up and break his neck, when I felt kind of sick at my stomach, and I says to myself, ‘You swine! that’s the way you’ve been treating that white man! How do you like yourself now?’”
Big Mitch clutched desperately at his rumpled hair.
“I’m going to be a gentleman,” he grunted, “if I have to chew gravel to do it. I’ll do it, though, and I’ll show up some day and surprise the old man before he cashes in his last lung. But if I don’t get a fresh start pretty soon, I’ll do something to that Penrhyn monkey that won’t be any young lady’s dancing-class, you bet your boots!