“The sixth will be about right for me.”
“Then we sink or swim, survive or perish, together!”
He was dapperly dressed, and though his yellowish checks were evidently ready-made, they were squeezed in at the waist and hoisted over the ankles in the latest style. He had the hatchet face of the clever Yankee, alert, sharply defined, with a high-bridged and rather bold English nose.
“Youngster looks like a pocket edition of the Duke of Wellington,” thought King O’Leary, registering his favorable impressions, and, before the other’s infectious spirits, he began to recover his natural zest.
Tootles—to give Mr. St. George Kidder at once his workaday name—meanwhile had been examining his companion with the impressionable eye of the artist. He saw the bulky body of a man approaching middle age, yet full of rough, brawny substance and weather-tried endurance. The great half-moon of a mouth was now turning up in its usual indomitable attitude toward life under the broad-spaced, jovial nose set between full cheeks breaking into dimples. Underneath wisps of tawny hair, rather Mephistophelian, were clear-blue eyes, brilliant and sharp as a brigand’s. The whole had a combination of companionable good humor, and instant aggression when necessary.
“Rather a rough nun in case of a scrap, I should fancy,” thought Tootles, who had his own way of expressing things. “However, he has a sense of humor—of my humor—which is distinctly in his favor.”
Suddenly he exclaimed aloud:
“Whoa there! All hands on deck stand by the lifeboats!”
The elevator, having drifted gradually past one dark floor after the other, had now come to a jolting stop between the third and the fourth, and began to churn up and down in a manner distinctly alarming.
“Sassafras, you’re feeding Tessie too much red meat,” said Tootles, shifting his metaphors as Sam came to the rescue.