He wouldn’t beg. He’d go three days without grub, and laugh all the time. It was mostly in the country and in small villages that he made his living. He could play seven different kinds of instruments without any instruments at all. Did it all with his mouth. And the kids—they went wild over him. In return for his entertainment, Thomas Jefferson wasn’t ashamed to take whatever came to him in the way of odd nickels and dimes.
Once the manager of a vaudeville house heard him on a street corner, and offered him a job at fifty a week if he’d sign a contract for a dozen weeks.
“Good Lord,” said Thomas Jefferson, “I wouldn’t know what to do with six hundred dollars!”
The next week he was cooking in a lumber-camp for his board. That’s Thomas Jefferson—or, rather, that’s what he was.
And now we’re coming to the girl who killed the bug in Thomas Jefferson—and rescued the king. She was born swell. She has blue eyes—the sort that can light up a dark day, and can make your head turn dizzy when they smile at you. And she’s got the right sort of hair to go with ‘em—red and gold and brown all mixed up, until you can’t tell which is which; the sort that makes you wonder if some big artist hasn’t been painting a picture for you, when you see it out in the sunshine.
She comes of a titled family, but she’d want to die to-morrow if Thomas Jefferson Brown didn’t worship her from the tips of her little toes to the top of her pretty head. She thinks he’s a king. And he is—one of those great, big, healthy kings that nature sometimes grows when it has half a chance.
II
It’s curious how the whole thing happened. Thomas Jefferson wandered up to Portland at the time we were fitting out a ship for a whaling cruise. We saw him imitating a banjo for a lot of kids down on the wharf, and the minute our eyes lit on him—Tucker’s and mine—we liked him. It isn’t necessary to go into the details of what happened after that. Just a week later, when Thomas Jefferson and I were shaking hands for the last time, a queer sort of look came into his eyes, and he said:
“Bobby, you’re the first man I ever knew that makes me feel like crying when you leave me.”