“Nothing doing. Tried the job last week. He was out on this verandy and he was walkin’ up and down, with his hands behind him and his head dropped, and I ses to myself, ‘Mebbe he’s through. I’ll tuck in a word edgeways now.’ So I slipped over and——”
“What did Dad say?”
Hilda was leaning forward, wide-eyed with delighted interest. Dad’s utterances were always matters of the profoundest psychological interest and pride to his admiring daughter.
Bully Bill lowered his voice confidentially.
“Miss Hilda, I ain’t got the nerve to repeat to you the curious string of damns and cusses that your father give me and——”
Hilda laughed, a rippling girlish chuckle of genuine pride and delight.
“Isn’t Dad a perfect peach when he starts swearing? Don’t you love it? It sounds so—so—healthy, somehow. Can’t he just rip out the dandiest string of swear words you ever did hear? I’ll bet there’s not another man in the entire country can cuss as my Dad can. Most of ’em run off just the ordinary common old damns, but Dad—why Dad can—can—literally coin cuss words. I’d rather hear my Dad cuss than—than—hear a prima donna sing. Why, do you know, the very first word that either Sandy or I learned to speak was ‘damn’!”
Up tossed the young head. Hilda’s white teeth shone as her fresh laughter rippled forth, and at that musical sound, and the sight of the beautiful, laughing young woman before him, moved by an irresistible impulse, Holy Smoke, who had been squatting at his work, jumped restlessly to his feet. Hilda’s back was to the door. The hall was dark behind her.
“Miss Hilda,” said Ho, ingratiatingly, “we thought as how if you would ask your father and——”
“I? Not on your life. It’s all I can do to induce him to eat, let alone talk of anything else in the world except chess—Kings, Queens, Knights, Bishops, Rooks, Pawns! Gods and devils! Why did he make this move, and what object he had in making that, and if he had done this and hadn’t done that such and such a thing might have happened. Why, Dad’s just plumb chess crazy!”