A locomotive whistled at the crossing two squares up the street, and the King smiled a little smile and rasped a lean and avaricious chin with a fabulously bony hand. He opined that locomotive would be drawing the monthly pay car which was due. The coming of the pay car meant many sportive railroad men—shopmen, yardmen, trainmen—abroad that evening with the good new money burning holes in the linings of their pockets.
Close by him, just behind him, a voice spoke his name—his proper name which he seldom heard—and the sound of it rubbed the smile off his face and turned it on the instant into a grim, long war-mask of a face.
“Mister Magee—Elmer—just a minute, please!”
Without shifting his body he turned his head and over the peak of one shoulder he regarded her dourly. She was a small woman and she was verging on middle age, and she was an exceedingly shabby little woman. Whatever of comeliness she might ever have had was now and forever gone from her. Hard years and the strain of them had ground the colour in and rubbed the plumpness out of her face, leaving in payment therefor deep lines and a loose skin-sac under the chin and hollows in the cheeks. The shapeless, sleazy black garments that she wore effectually concealed any remnant of grace that might yet abide in her body. Only her eyes testified she had ever been anything except a forlorn and drooping slattern. They were big bright black eyes.
This briefly was the aspect of the woman who stood alongside him, speaking his name. She had come up so quietly that he never heard her. But then her shoes were old and worn and had lasted long past the age when shoes will squeak.
He made no move to raise his hat. Slantwise across the high ridge of his twisted shoulder he looked at her long and contemptuously.
“Well,” he said at length, “back ag'in, huh? Well, whut is it now, huh?”
She put up a little work-gnarled hand to a tight skew of brown hair streaked thickly with grey. In the gesture was something essentially feminine—something pathetic too.
“I reckon you know already what it is, Elmer,” she said. “It's about my boy—it's about Eddie.”
“I told you before and I tell you ag'in I ain't your boy's guardeen,” he answered her.