“Tchkk!” he clucked testily. “Rats ... an’ sech like. I’ve ’ad ’em.... Yer cawn’t skeer me wiv yer fancies,” he shrilled suddenly, with senile defiance. “’Ow abaht you? ’Tis an Aberdeen man’s ‘Say w’en!’ yer poured aht fer yourself, I noticed—an’ then yer turns rahnd an’ torks ter me like a bloomin’ unfundusi. Whau! I korner fancies!” he wound up bitterly.
The Sergeant swallowed the home-thrust with a tolerant grin.
“Ain’t figurin’ on practisin’ what I preach just yet,” he rejoined.
“I’m a pore old feller,” whimpered Tucker, dropping his pipe and beginning to weep with maudlin self-pity. “Yer all tries to ‘come it’ over me.”
The gray beard jerked up and down convulsively with his sobs.
“Aw, h—l! come, now,” said Benton, not unkindly. “Yu’ bring a lot o’ yore troubles on yoreself. Why, don’t yu’ sell out here, Dad, an’ go back East to yore son there, where yu’d be looked after properly? Yu’re too old to be livin’ here on yore lonesome like this.”
The old man gazed drearily through the open door.
“I wuz dahn theer two years agone,” he said huskily, and with a querulous, childish simplicity that moved his hearer more than that individual cared to show. “My ’Arry’s a good lad, but that theer vrouw o’ ’is kills my pig properly. Nah!—there ain’t no peace theer. An’ th’ kinders cries, an’ w’enever ’e tries ter stan’ hup fer hisself she hups an’ knocks ’im off th’ perch reg’lar. She started on me, too,” he went on, spitting vindictively. “But I pulled aht of it an’ come back ’ere. I ’member one night I went ’ome wiv a bottle ter ’ave a smile wiv me b’y. Th’ kitchen door were shut, an’ I c’ud ’ear ’em a-goin’ to it fer fair. All of a sudden there come such a smack, that I guess she were a-tryin’ ter prove whether ’is block or ’er mop-stick were th’ ’ardest. I weren’t a-goin’ buttin’ in where dry pokes an’ ’ard words wuz a-goin’, so I trekked ant of it quick—dahn ter th’ pub on th’ corner o’ Iroquois Street, an’ got dronk peaceful on me own. Nah,” he concluded, spitting again contemptuously, “folks is best single.”
The Sergeant looked hard at the careworn, dissipated old face, doubting—and not for the first time, either—whether, under that simple exterior, there lay not a better philosophy than he himself could boast of.
“Aye,” he agreed slowly. “Like as not yu’re right, Dad—like as not. Now, what was it yu’ come to see me about?”