"Well, you ain't banks," says Silas. "And banks is."
I was walking away and thinking it over, when I stopped stock-still in the street. The National Bank—it was the National Bank that Jeffro had his thirty-seven dollars in.
I felt as if I had to do something for him, then and there. And that afternoon I took my trowel and went up to his little place, and thought I'd dig round some in the garden that was coming up, gay as a button.
When I stepped inside the gate, I looked up at the house, and I saw the front door was open. "Land," I thought, "I hope they haven't stole what little he had in there, too." And I stepped up to the door.
In the wooden chair in the middle of the floor sat Jeffro. His hat was pulled down over his eyes, his legs were thrust out in front of him, one of his arms was hanging down, and the other one was in a white sling.
"Mr. Jeffro—Mr. Jeffro!" I says. "Oh—what's the matter?"
He looked up, and his face never changed at sight of me, nor he never got up or moved. And his look—well, it wasn't the look of Jeffro any more than feathers have the look of a bird. But one thing I knew about that look—he was hungry. I could tell that look anywhere, because I've been hungry myself, with no food coming from anywheres.
I flew to the cupboard where I'd put in the few things, and in a jiffy I had some soup heating and a box of crackers opened. I brought the bowl to the table, all steaming and good-smelling, and he drew up there without a word and ate with his hat on—ate like I never saw a man eat before.
When he got through: "Tell me about it, Mr. Jeffro," I says. And he told me.
It wasn't anything very new. Jeffro had been in the mines since the first of November, and the first of January the strike had begun—the strike against a situation that Jeffro drew for me that afternoon, telling it without any particular heat, but just plain and quiet. He told me how he had gone with some of the men to the house of one of the owners to talk of settlement.