"I confess that my meaning might have been clearer, but behind it lies a sufficient cause for its utterance."
He put down his knife and looked at me helplessly, shook his head as if puzzled, and fell to eating with this not very comforting observation:
"Jerk me out of bed any time of night, along here, and I can tell you where I am, and I am pretty good at foreseeing a change in the channel, but once in a while I strike a thing that I can't figger out, and I reckon you've just handed me one."
Miss Hatch was now so occupied with feeding her dog that she had no time to titter at my discomfiture, but I caught sight of Culpepper's hateful and invidious smile.
The meal was finished in silence, and I thought that the pilot had forgotten my clouded remark, but when he had resumed his place at the wheel, he cut his sharp old eye at me and said:
"But there are a good many things I can see, and one of them is, that you and them other show folks don't get along together very well."
"It's their fault," I replied.
"Of course," he rejoined, giving me a mere glimpse of his old eye, and this time it was not merely shrewd—it was rascally.
"I have done my best to merit their friendship," I said, somewhat sharply. "But they spurn me, they insinuate that I am an elephant on the manager's hands, when you yourself have been kind enough to tell me that my part of the performance was—"
"Good, first-rate," he broke in. "But in the play you almost have a set of love jimjams on account of that woman, and let her reform you, and all that sort of thing. It beats me," he added, shaking his head. "I don't see how a man can love and cavort with a woman one minute, and hate her the next. I pass, when it comes to that."