“’Bout ten o’clock.”
“Ten o’clock!” Josiah exclaimed. “Why, I never was up so late as this except once, when the sewin’ circle was at our house, an’ Deacon Jones an’ father was talkin’ so long that the deacon forgot to go home. You see, mother didn’t want to send me to bed ’cause he’d think it was a hint to him. I can’t go up there at this time of night.”
“Then you can stay here; there’s plenty of floor,” Sadie replied in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Do you lay down there when you go to bed?”
“I can have my choice of doin’ that or standin’ up, so I stretch right out, an’ am mighty glad of the chance most of the time.”
Josiah looked around the wretched apartment, then out of the window, and back at the girl for whom he was beginning to entertain a very friendly feeling.
“I’ll stay here too,” he said decidedly. “I don’t reckon there’ll be much chance to sleep; but that old wretch sha’n’t pound you to-morrow, unless she waits till I’ve gone out,” and Josiah laid his satchel in one corner of the room, that it might serve him as a pillow.
Sadie was perfectly willing to defer the search for Tom and Bob until morning.
This fellow from the country had treated her more kindly than the majority of her boy acquaintances; and she was well content to have him act as her guardian when the old woman, half crazed with the desire for more liquor, should begin her usual tirade.
If the worthy Mother Hunter ever owned household goods, they had all found their way to the second-hand stores or the pawnbroker’s shop before this; for now one table, very shaky as to legs and with a portion of the top missing, and two dilapidated chairs, comprised the entire list of furniture.