"Yes, it were the lead in the white paint that poisoned me," agreed David; "I'd been paintin' cattle cars pretty stiddy, which was a job most on 'em tried to skip."
"I see, and the superintendent told Mr. Hart how faithfully you'd worked and the result was that he sent you this letter with a deed for the house at the Point. It shows that he thought a great deal of you; and even if we shouldn't be able to find him," she continued with a shade of apprehension, "it seems to me this letter, old as it is, ought to help in getting you some sort of a position, just temporarily."
"But it ain't some sort of a position I'm wantin'," the other objected, "it's a railroad position; and though railroad corporations is one thing," he continued, "and car shops is another, still they do business together constant; and I guess we'll find the Big Middletown people know all about Nicholas Hart when we ask 'em."
And so these two, the one so lately emerged from childhood and the other just reëntering it, started on their quest, and from their eyes looked out the same innocence, ignorance and unquenchable hope.
"I'll feel safer about Grandfather when he's occupied," thought the girl, "but it must be light work, I'll insist upon that; and then directly I'll find something to do myself."
Since their arrival in the city a fortnight before, old David had manifested a growing irresponsibility. Deprived of his accustomed occupations and transferred to the streets of the metropolis, he had become like a ship without a rudder. So far, his driftings had been as pleasant as they were aimless, but more than once he had been lost, more than once, following the lead of his errant curiosity, had barely escaped serious accident. And there was no telling how soon the threatening dangers of the new existence might overwhelm him. Insensibly, in the midst of his delight, he looked to the young girl for guidance. She it was who had settled them in their present quarters, three small rooms at the top of an old building in lower New York, rooms selected because of their cheapness and because two windows overlooked a wharf at which foreign ships were tethered while a third window looked toward the west. She it was who had added to their meagre stock of house plenishings at push-carts and cheap shops. Indeed, she it was who had assumed entire responsibility for the undertaking.
Nora Gage, who now received a lower wage than formerly, and in consequence performed only such duties as she chose, grumbled constantly. The poor fare on which Rachel and the old man subsisted filled her with disgust, and she would have gratified her gastronomic preferences out of her savings of twenty years, had it not been that the queer foreign foods, in which the markets of the neighbourhood abounded, were not to her taste. Even old David at moments was inclined to be fractious, and Rachel, who had wilfully played the part of Fate to these two, was forced to listen as patiently as she could to their criticisms.
On the afternoon in question when she emerged from the house with her grandfather, the old man scowled; for the street was dank with mist and clamorous with the roar of the nearby "elevated."
"This ain't a nice street," he complained, "I don't like the smell on it, and with everything swallowed up in the fog so, we can't see the only thing worth seein'—the ships."
"But perhaps we can later; when we come back the fog may be gone," Rachel comforted him. However, a touch of the cold and damp seemed to threaten her own heart.