Part 7 (2/2)
”Gracious! Can that clock be right? It's after eleven! Say, listen: I'm going off watch at twelve. If you'll be here I'll tell you then.”
”Yes, ma'am--I'll be here.”
”All right. Good-by. Much obliged, I'm sure.”
She squeezed back of Minnie, and scampered through the restaurant door.
Hiram stood watching the streams of water--that is, he looked that way.
CHAPTER VII
HIRAM, THE b.u.t.tERFLY
”Mother, I've come home to die!” gasped Playmate Tweet.
He was seated in one of the yellow chairs near a window of the lounging room. He had dropped his newspaper and was staring at Hiram Hooker as he strode through the door.
Hiram seated himself on the edge of a chair and grinned uncomfortably.
The ordeal of appearing before Tweet in his new clothes, at first poignantly dreaded, had been absent from his thoughts for the past hour. Standing there before the jeweler's store after Lucy Dalles had left him, tingling blissfully in every vein, the mundane thought that Tweet was probably awaiting him in the lodging house had obtruded itself and hurried him up the street. As he opened the lounging-room door he thought once more of his clothes.
Tweet rubbed his eyes and looked again. ”Christopher Columbus!” he added in an undertone. He blinked his eyes three times, then threw himself back and laughed uproariously.
For a half minute he shook in his chair, then got up, wiped his twisted nose with his handkerchief, and came over to his half resentful charge.
”Well, Hiram,” he said with a chuckle, ”how much did they set us back?”
”Set us back?”
”I mean, how poor are we now?”
”How poor are _we_?”
”Sure--Tweet, Hooker & Co. pays the bills.”
”I guess I c'n do what I want to with my own money, can't I?”
”Sure--sure! Don't get your s.h.i.+rt off. I don't mean to insinuate that you're not capable o' judiciously handlin' the firm's money. I just want you to read me the balance sheet.”
”Well, then, I spent thirty-eight dollars, and I've got twenty-nine dollars left.”
”Stand up.”
Hiram did so.
”Turn round.”
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