“I must get along now!”
“Wait. Tell me of yourself,” answered Doctor Ludington genially, placing his back against the door while he continued:
“You said you had not tasted food for days, and your clothing is tattered and threadbare so that it does not keep out the winter’s cold. I cannot let you go like this without helping you further. Are you out of work?”
The fellow turned his face aside into the shadow muttering gruffly:
“That’s it—out o’ work!”
“Are you a stranger in the city?”
“Been livin’ here all my life!”
“You don’t look like it. I should take you for a countryman in distress.”
“But I ain’t, sir. Leastwise, I’m in distress; ’tain’t no use to deny hit, starvin’ and freezin’, ’ithout a ruff to kiver my head. Yit I ain’t no country jay, no, sir! I was borned and brung up in New York,” protested his protégé, in a quavering voice of some intangible fear.
“Then I’m mistaken in fancying I had seen you somewhere before in my own past. You were never in West Virginia, were you?”