“Fish-pole!” says he.
“Is it swimming, then?” I says. And then I felt sick all over. For I remembered that David had gone to work in Silas Sykes’s canning factory.
“Oh, David,” I patched it up. “I forgot. You’re a man now.”
At that he put back his thin little shoulders, and stuck out his thin little chest, and held up his sharp little chin. And he said:
“Yup. I’m a man now. I get $2.50 a week, now.”
“Whew!” says I. “When do you bank your first million?”
He grinned and broke into a run again. “I’m docked if I’m late,” he shouts back.
I looked after him. It didn’t seem ten days since he was born. And here he was, of the general contour of a clay pipe, going to work. His father had been crippled in the factory, his mother was half sick, and there were three younger than David, and one older.
“Kind of nice of Silas to give David a job,” I thought. “I don’t suppose he’s worth much to him, he’s so little.”
And that was all I thought, being that most of us uses our heads far more frequent to put hats on than for any other purpose.