"Listen to me," instructed Tommy. "You are young at cadging and I will have to give you some points."
Ben not only gave an attentive ear but he took a good look at his companion in the broad daylight. The boy might have been fourteen or fifteen years of age; a round, plump little fellow, with a merry face, and sparkling, hazel eyes shaded by long, black lashes. There was something girlish in his cheek, it was so round, and smooth, and rosy, without the slightest sign of those capillary advantages that manhood's prime was to decorate it with. An ungovernable mass of curly black hair straggled from under a well worn slouch hat that had bronzed beneath sun and storm, and become limp and shapeless in its career of pillow and basket. When Tommy spoke his voice had a clear, silvery ring, quite pleasant to the ear; and when he laughed he showed a dazzling set of teeth. Such was Ben's new companion. He looked as though he might be a good boy who would do many a bad trick.
"Listen," he said. "We must get breakfast right off. You take that side of the street, and I'll take this. Go to the back doors and tell them any sort of a tale that comes handy; only don't forget to say, every time, that this is the first time you have ever had to ask for such a thing in your life, and that you scorn to accept it as a charity, but want to earn what you eat, and you would like to saw wood enough for your breakfast. But before you knock be sure you look around and see that they use coal. We have no time to fool away manufacturing firewood. Now go on, and we will meet down at the corner of the next block; the one that gets there first, to wait for the other."
Of all forlorn mortals, Benjamin Cleveland felt at that moment the most forlorn. He could have charged a battery, where there was no chance of coming back alive, cheerfully. He could have ventured any desperate deed that required mere physical courage; but to go into a house and beg for something to eat,—he could not! His heart jumped to his throat with all the nervous energy that attends physical fear in men differently constituted from our hero. Gate after gate was passed, he persuading and promising himself that the next one should surely be entered. Once he did stop with his hand on a latch, but chancing to look up at the house he saw a little boy eyeing him from an upper window, and retreated completely vanquished. It required all his stubbornness and constant thoughts of New Orleans to prevent his giving up the projected "tramp" there and then, and acknowledging himself a failure. What was $20,000 to such humiliation!
But another course of reasoning came to his aid: "You call it pride, Ben; but are mistaken. It's lack of nerve, my boy," said this new logician. "There is as much nerve required in facing humiliations as there is in facing a battery. More, sometimes. Physically brave men are plentiful. It is mental bravery that is lacking in you and thousands of others. To be sure it is low. It is humiliating. It is begging. You will be a beggar. But you have an object to attain, and it can only be attained the one way. It is either do it, or surrender!"
This sophistry at last wrought so upon him that closing his eyes upon all surroundings, he made a blind dash at a gate, and without allowing himself time to think hurried around to the mansion's back door, at which he was actually knocking before he fully understood himself, and without once remembering Tommy's injunction to be careful and satisfy himself that there was no obnoxious wood-pile in the vicinity.
A man answered his knock, and all his courage immediately oozed out. If it had only been a woman, he thought, it would have been different. But how could he ask a man for something to eat! He could not, and he did not, but stammering out some irrelevant inquiry about an imaginary Mr. Brown, he blushed and looked decidedly sheepish. The man, eyeing him suspiciously, replied that no Mr. Brown lived there, or in that neighborhood, and shut the door in his face.
Poor Ben made his way to the sidewalk feeling smaller than ever in his life. Truly if the $20,000 is to be earned at this price it will be dear enough; and he had not the heart to make another back door appeal, but walked to the appointed rendezvous, and there awaited Tommy.
That young gentleman shortly appeared, smacking his lips, and looking as well fed and contented as possible.
"I had a splendid breakfast! Mutton chops, hot waffles, fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, coffee,—oh my eye, such coffee! Three cups of it! Oh!" and Tommy, his vocabulary unable to furnish him with adjectives to do full justice to the merits of the coffee, rolled his eyes instead, little knowing the misery his bill of fare was giving poor empty stomached Ben.