“I can only say it is my own.”
“Why I just LOVE poetry,” said the woman. “Come in.”
“Come up,” said the man, and hustled out a chair.
“I’ll go right in and get supper,” said the wife. She was a breezy creature with a loud musical voice. She doubtless developed it by trying to talk against giant powder.
I told the man my story, in brief.
After quite a smoke, he said, “So you’ve walked from Wilkesbarre this afternoon. Why, man, that’s seventeen miles.”
I do not believe it was over fourteen.
He continued, “I’m awful glad to see a white man. This place is full of Bohunks, and Slavs, and Rooshians, and Poles and Lickerishes (Lithuanians?). They’re not bad to have around, but they ain’t Cawcasians. They all talk Eyetalian.”
The fellow’s manner breathed not only race-fraternity, but industrial fraternity. It had no suggestion of sheltered agricultural caution. It was sophisticated and anti-capitalistic. It said, “You and I are against the system. That’s enough for brotherhood.”
Now that he stood and refilled his pipe from a tobacco box nailed just inside the door, I saw him as in a picture-frame. He had powerful but slanting shoulders. He was so tall he must needs stoop to avoid the lintel. With his bent neck, he looked as though he could hold up a mine caving in. His general outlines seemed to be hewn from fence-rails, then hung with grotesque muscles of loose leather. His eyebrows were grown together. From looking down long passageways his eyes were marvellously owl-like. He was cadaverous. He had a beak nose. He had a retreating chin but, breaking the rules of phrenology, he managed to convey the impression of a driving personality. He looked like an enormous pick-axe.