“Clang!” yelped father, coming around again. “Yingle—yingle—yingle! Pull in them port fenders and mouse that anchor; we’re going outside this trip.”
“Just see the fool notion you have gone and put into him when he was all ready to come along with me!” she blazed. She knocked her little knuckles together in as fine a state of temper as I ever viewed spouting in a female. She turned suddenly and drove one of her fists against a man whom I had not noticed till then. He was tall—as long as the moral law, as we say East—as thin as a pump-handle, and he had a tangle of gray whisker and beard on top of him that made him look like a window-mop. He fell down when she hit him. She kicked him with the point of a little shoe, and he came up, unfolding in sections like a carpenter’s two-foot rule.
“Slap this man’s face, Ike, and send him along about his business,” she commanded.
But he only teetered and grinned and drooled, and winked at me over her shoulder.
“Oh, you are only another drunken fool!” she raged; and she stretched on tiptoe, and beat his face with the flat of her hand. “You have stood here without putting up a finger to help me get him off that turn-table, where he’s disgracing himself. I wonder whether there are any real men left in San Francisco!” She was in such a state of mind that I was mighty ashamed by then, I tell you that!
I dropped my baggage and took off my hat.
“I don’t know much about San Francisco and the real men, miss,” I told her, “for I’ve been in town only about five minutes. I reckon it makes an Easterner dizzy to be rushed in and dropped here. I didn’t mean to make trouble for you. Seeing that I’ve made it, I’ll unmake it if I can. Do you want your father—saying it is your father—brought off that turn-table?”
“No!” she snapped, still spiteful and all worked up. “I want you to think up something else for him to do on there as soon as he gets tired of doing what you suggested.”
Well, it was up to me to butt into that affair still farther—I could see that. I couldn’t sneak off and leave that girl feeling that way about me. I hopped on to the moving turn-table, took father by the arm, and told him his daughter wanted him to come along. He braced himself and shook loose.
“Nossir,” said he. “I’ve paid my money, and I’ll stay aboard till I get to where I’m bound.”