"Well, I shall try and believe you this time," said Stone. "Miss Lacharme thinks you're honest."
"A guy couldn't lie to her!" said the boy.
"Then just consider me her representative," said Stone, smiling.
Collie squatted in the meager shade of the "coop."
Walter Stone, dropping the pony's reins, came and sat beside the lad. There was something in the older man's presence, an unspoken assurance of comradeship and sincerity that annulled the boy's tendency to reticence about himself. He began hesitatingly, "My dad was a drinkin' man. Ma died, and he got worse at it. I was a kid and didn't care, for he never done nothin' to me. We lived back East, over a pawnbroker's on Main Street. One day pa come home with a timetable. He sat up 'most all night readin' it. Every time I woke up, he was readin' it and talkin' to himself. That was after ma died.
"In the mornin', when I was gettin' dressed, he come over and says to take the needle he had and stick it through the timetable anywhere. I was scared he was goin' to have the jimmies. But I took the needle—it had black thread in it—and stuck it through the timetable. He opened the page and laughed awful loud and queer. Albuquerque was where the needle went in. He couldn't say the name right, but he kept lookin' at it.
"Then he went out and was gone all day and all night. When he come back he showed me a whole wad of money. I says, 'Where did you get it?' He got mad and tells me to shut up.
"That day we got on a train. I says, 'Where are we goin'?' and he says to never mind, and did I want some peanuts.
"We kept ridin' and ridin' in the same car, and eatin' bananas and san'wiches and sleepin' settin' up at nights. I was just about sick when we come to Albuquerque. You see, that was where the needle went through the timetable, and dad said we would get off there. He got awful drunk that night.
"Next day he said he was goin' to quit liquor and make a fresh start. I knowed he wouldn't, 'cause he always said that next mornin'. But I guess he tried to quit. I don't know.