I looked at Alice––Miss Foster I always called her myself––and certainly she was a lovely girl, though perhaps a little too conscious of it. She was one of the few that weren’t going in for anything that I could see. She wasn’t even weighing herself, or at least she didn’t until Mr. Withrow, with his company manners in fine working order, asked her if she wouldn’t allow him to weigh her.
There were people in town who said it was not for nothing that Alice Foster was so chummy with my cousin Nell. They meant, of course, that being chummy with Nell, who came down regularly to see me, gave herself a good excuse to come along and so have a word with Withrow. Fred Withrow himself was a big, well-built, handsome man––an unusually good-looking man, I’d call him––and a great heart-breaker, according to report––some of it his own. And he was wealthy, 6 too. I did not know, but somehow or other I did not believe it, or maybe it was that I hoped rather than believed that Miss Foster did not care particularly for him; for I did not like him myself, although I worked for him and was taking his money. Being day in and day out with him in the store, you see I saw him pretty much as he really was, and I hated to think of a fine girl––for with all her cool ways I knew Miss Foster was that––marrying him. Just how Withrow thought he stood with Miss Foster I did not know––he was a pretty close-mouthed man when he wanted to be. Miss Foster herself was that reserved kind of a girl that you cannot always place. She struck me as being a girl that would die before she would confess a weakness or a troublesome feeling. And yet, without knowing how it came there, there was always a notion in the back of my head that made me half-believe that she did not come to the store with my cousin out of pure companionship. There was something besides––and what could it be but Withrow?
After the weighing was done Nell asked me all at once, “I hear, Joe, that Captain Hollis is going to have your new vessel? How is that? We––I thought that Captain Blake was going master of her––and such a pretty vessel!”
I answered that I didn’t know how it was, and 7 looked over at my employer, as much as to say, “Maybe he can tell you.”
I think now that I must have been a pretty impudent lad, letting my employer know what I thought of him as I did in those days. I think, too, he had a pretty shrewd notion of what I thought of himself and Maurice Blake. At any rate, after the girls had gone, he worked himself into a fine bit of temper, and I talked back at him, and the end of it was that he discharged me––or 1 quit––I’m not sure which. I do know that it was rapid-fire talk while it lasted.
It was some satisfaction to me to tell Withrow just about what I did think of him before I went. He didn’t quite throw me out of the door, although he was big enough for that; but he looked as if he wanted to. And maybe he would have, too, or tried it, only I said, “Mind I don’t give you what Tommie Clancy threatened to give you once,” and his nerve went flat. I couldn’t have handled him as Clancy had any more than I could have hove a barrel of salt mackerel over my head, which was what the strong fishermen of the port were doing about that time to prove their strength; but the bluff went, and I couldn’t help throwing out my chest as I went out the door and thinking that I was getting to be a great judge of human nature.