I was beginning to see what I had done. Billy looked in my direction, and as our eyes met he smiled a little.
"I hardly know, Mr. Blunt," said he. "I just asked my way and followed directions. Is it so very difficult to get in?"
I saw at once that he was a good deal decenter than he looked.
"Well, what can you do?" shouted Pa.
"Almost anything, I hope," answered Billy. "I've had no practical experience with inside work; but I have – "
"Oh, yes, I know!" said Pa, in that unfeeling way which experience and success seem to impart to the biggest-hearted men – and Pa is surely one of these. "It's the old story. As soon as a dub gets so he can cut over a rural telephone, or put in an extension-bell, or climb a twenty-five without getting seasick, he can do 'almost anything.' What one, definite, concrete thing can you do?"
"For one thing," said Billy icily, "I think I could help some by taking a broom to this factory floor out here."
"All right," said Pa, after looking at him a moment. "The broom goes! Give this man an order for a broom. Put him on the pay-roll at seven dollars a week. Find out who let him in here, and caution whoever it was against letting it occur again. Call up Mr. Sweet, and tell him I want a word with him on those Winnipeg estimates. Make an engagement with Mr. Bayley of the street-car company to lunch with me at the club at two." And Pa was running in his groove again.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, as he passed me going out.
"Thank you," I answered. "It's of no consequence – "
And then I noticed that he was looking into my eyes in a wistful and pathetic way, as if protesting against going out. I blushed as I showed him to the door: and he wasn't the first whose eyes had protested, either.
"You mustn't violate the rules, Dolly," said Pa, as we crossed the bridge in the bubble, going home. "You know perfectly well that I can't say 'no' to these tramps – "
"He wasn't a tramp," said I.
"A perfect hobo," answered Pa. "I know the type well. I have to let Burns handle them."
"He was very graceful," said I.
"Any lineman is," replied Pa. "They have the best exercise in the world. If he steals anything, you're responsible, my dear."
I supposed the incident to be closed with my statement that he had nice eyes, and Pa's sniff; but, in a few days, Pa, who watches the men like a cat, surprised me by saying that my graceful hobo was all right.
"He gathered up and saved three dollars' worth of beeswax the other men were wasting, the first day," said Pa. "Melted and strained and put it in the right place without asking any questions. And then he borrowed a blow-torch and an iron, and began practising soldering connections. He looks good to me."
"Me, too," said I.
"Blessed be the hobo," said the Colonel, "for he shall reach paradise!"
It seems strange, now, to think of my hearing these things unmoved. The dreadful humiliation to which Billy was subjected, the noble fortitude with which he bore it, and the splendid way in which he uplifted the menial tasks to which he was assigned, have always reminded me of Sir Gareth serving as a scullion in Arthur's kitchen. It is not alone in the chronicles of chivalry – but I must hasten this narrative.
I must not delay even to inform you of the ways in which it was discovered that Billy could do all sorts of things; that there was no blue-print through which his keen eye could not see, and no engineering error – like that in the Polyphase Generator – that he couldn't detect; or how he was pushed up and up by force of sheer genius, no one knowing who he was until he found himself, like an eagle among buzzards, at the head of a department, and coming into the office to see Pa quite in a legitimate way.
"Hooray! Hooray!" came from behind the tree.
"Shut up, Poet!" commanded the Artist, "or I'll come back there!"
I didn't know these things personally, because I had left the office. I had found out that there seemed to be more soul-nurture in artistic metal work than in typewriting, and had fitted up a shop in the Fine Arts Building, where Louise Amerland and I were doing perfectly enchanting stunts in hammered brass and copper – old Roman lamps and Persian lanterns, after designs we made ourselves. Pa parted with his secretary with a sigh, the nature of which may be a question better left unsettled.
This romance really begins with my visit, after months and months of absence, to the restaurant which I had dinged at Pa until he had instituted for the help. I told him that the social side of labor was neglected shamefully, and for the work people to eat at the same table with their superintendents and employers would be just too dear and democratic, and he finally yielded growlingly. He was awfully pleased afterward when the papers began to write the thing up. He said it was the cheapest advertising he ever got, and patted me on the shoulder and asked me if I wasn't ashamed to be so neglectful of my great invention. So one day I got tired of working out Rubáiyát motifs in brass, and I went over to the café for luncheon, incog. And what do you think? Billy came in and sat down very informally right across from me!
"Hello!" said he, putting out his hand. "I've been looking for you for eons, to – to thank you, you know. Don't you remember me?"
Before I knew it I had blushingly given him my hand for a moment.
"Yes," I replied, taking it away, and assuming a more properly dignified air. "I hope you have risen above seven a week and a broom; and I am glad to see that your head has healed up."
"Thank you," he replied. "I am running the installation department of the dynamo end of the business. And you? I'm no end glad to see you back. Did you get canned for letting me in? I've had a good many bad half-hours since I found you gone, thinking of you out hunting a job on – on my account. You – pardon me – don't look like a girl who would have the E. M. F. in the nerve-department to go out and compete, you know."
I was amazed at the creature's effrontery, at first; and then the whole situation cleared up in my mind. I saw that I had an admirer (that was plain) who didn't know me as Rollin Blunt's heiress at all, but only as a shop-mate in the Mid-Continent Electric Company's factory – a stenographer who had done him a favor. It was more fun than most girls might think.
"How did you find out," said I, "that I had been – ah – canned?"
"I watched for you," he replied. "Began as soon as my promotion to the switchboard work made it so I could. After a couple of months' accumulation of data I ventured upon the generalization that the old man – "
"The who?"
"Mr. Blunt, I mean, of course," he amended, "had fired you for letting me in. Out of work long?"
"N-no," said I; "hardly a week."
"Where are you now?" he asked.
"I'm in a shop," I stammered, "in Michigan Avenue."
I looked about to see if any of the employees who knew me were present, but could see none except Miss Crowley, who wouldn't meet a man in the same office in a year, and a dynamo-man never, and who is near-sighted, anyhow. So I felt safe in permitting him to deceive himself. It is thus that the centuries of oppression which women have endured impress themselves on our more involuntary actions in little bits of disingenuousness against which we should ever struggle. At the time, though, to sit chatting with him in the informal manner of co-laborers at the noon intermission was great fun. It was then that I began to notice more fully what a really fine figure he had, and how brown and honest and respectful his eyes were, even when he said "Hello" to me; as if I were a telephone, and how thrilling was his voice.
"I'd like," said he, "to call on you – if I might."
I was as fluttered as the veriest little chit from the country.
"I – I can't very well receive you," said I. "My – the people where I – I stop wouldn't like it."
"I'm quite a respectable sort of chap," said he. "My name's Helmerston, and my people have been pretty well known for two or three hundred years up in Vermont, where we live – in a teaching, preaching, book-writing, rural sort of way, you know. I'm a Tech