The tramp scowled at him. “You’re laying it on a little too thick! You won’t get any one to believe that!” he said uncertainly. Suddenly he put himself in front of Pelle, and pushed his bull-like forehead close to the other’s face. “Now, I’ll just tell you something, my boy!” he said. “I don’t want to touch any one the first day I’m out, but you’d better take yourself and your confounded uppishness somewhere else; for I’ve been lying here waiting for company all day.”
“I didn’t mean to offend any one,” said Pelle absently. He looked as if he had not come back to earth, and appeared to have no intention of doing anything.
“Oh, didn’t you! That’s fortunate for you, or I might have taken a color-print of your doleful face, however unwillingly. By the way, mother said I was to give you her love.”
“Are you Ferdinand?” asked Pelle, raising his head.
“Oh, don’t pretend!” said Ferdinand. “Being in gaol seems to have made a swell of you!”
“I didn’t recognize you,” said Pelle earnestly, suddenly recalled to the world around him.
“Oh, all right—if you say so. It must be the fault of my nose. I got it bashed in the evening after I’d buried mother. I was to give you her love, by the way.”
“Thank you!” said Pelle heartily. Old memories from the “Ark” filled his mind and sent his blood coursing through his veins once more. “Is it long since your mother died?” he asked sympathetically.
Ferdinand nodded. “It was a good thing, however,” he said, “for now there’s no one I need go and have a bad conscience about. I’d made up my mind that she deserved to have things comfortable in her old age, and I was awfully careful; but all the same I was caught for a little robbery and got eight months. That was just after you got in—but of course you know that.”
“No! How could I know it?”