“Don’t hurt my boy!” she said to the yard foreman. “Don’t work him too hard. He’s beginning to look tired of an evening.”
“Well! I guess that won’t hurt him any,” returned the foreman, smiling, not unfeelingly. “He’s doing his bit, and who--who knows when it may become the main bitt?” perpetrating a whimsical joke as he looked towards a finished vessel, wedged up on the launching-ways of an adjoining shipyard, all ready to be launched to-day. “See--see that sawed-off, drab post rising from her deck, ma’am?” he challenged, being a man of words, with a voice that habitually hovered about the sky-line, if Libby’s clung to the marshes. “That’s one o’ the two bitt-heads--weather main bitt, we call it--to which by’n-by the main-sheet controlling the mains’l will be belayed--made fast--safety an’ progress both, y’ understand!”
The mother stared at him smilingly--began to set him down as a “character.”
“I’d let the boy alone if I were you, lady,” went on the yard-boss earnestly. “If his present ‘tough’ bit never shows up on deck as the main bitt on which everything hangs, yet it’s that for him now, if the best in him is anchored to it. Get--me?”
The mother did. She refrained from condoling with her son upon the sameness of the work in which Blind Tim and he were a team, patted the sightless horse, which had “pulled himself blind” in the service of a city fire department, upon the nose, and drove off.
But the boy felt that he had been made an object of solicitude; he “gloomed” outright and made up his mind, once for all, to “jump his job” before another ten days were over, in favor of one softer, or swifter, as the case might be.
“Bah! I could stick it out better in the trenches,” he said to himself.
But----
“It’s a good line. Hold it--Mike!” challenged the foreman, reading, perhaps, what was passing in his mind.
Young Crœsus started. It was novel to hear himself addressed as “Mike.” A red glow rose to his neck. He did not resent it. Instead it warmed him a very little, as if he had stretched just one toe towards a fire--but not enough to redden the blues.