“Why shouldn’t he be?”
Mrs. Coogan entered and stood, one hand clutching a newspaper, the other pointing dramatically at Kallaher. “It may be so, but he don’t look it,” she said.
Before they could question her she began reading from the paper: “Mike Kallaher, a ditch digger on the new Twelfth Street sewer, is a small man but a mighty. A horse, driven too near the ditch to-day, fell in. ‘Begorra,’ said Mike, ‘can’t a man work in peace?’ He laid down his shovel, spat on his hands, and heaved the horse back into the street. The foreman thought he had been hurt when the horse fell in, but he wasn’t, and he was not in the least bothered by having to throw him back out again. He went back to his digging.”
“Let me see that paper.” Kallaher rose and took it from her hand. Slowly he went over the story—which the reporter who wrote it had thought exceeding clever. “Yeh,” he said finally, “that’s me, all right.”
Mrs. Coogan looked upon him with respect. “I never thought much of you before, Mike Kallaher, but you’re the only man I know that could pick up a horse.” She turned to his wife. “It’s no wonder you’re a meek woman, Mary, but you ought to be proud of a man like that, sure.”
“Are you coming on with supper now?” asked Kallaher in a mighty voice of the speechless Mrs. Kallaher. “Be quick now, or I’ll give you what’s needing.”
Never before had he dared make a threat as if he meant it. His wife was struck with sudden awe. She gasped and hurried silently with the setting on of supper. She trembled and dropped a dish.
“You poor clumsy dub!” roared her husband, towering to the height of five-feet-two. “Are you so weak you can’t hold a pot, now?”
“Excuse me, Michael,” she murmured. “Excuse me, man. I was excited.”
Mrs. Coogan saw with approval that Kallaher was bullying his wife, and went down the street to tell the neighbourhood.