Page:Harris Dickson--Old Reliable in Africa.djvu/85

 Old Reliable halted and grinned a noble grin: "I comes from Vicksburg, Missippi, suh."

Guinea Ryan, the freckle-faced nondescript, lay sprawling in the shade. He wore clothes, but of no describable kind. "What's your name?" he asked.

"Zack Foster, suh! But ev'ybody, white an' black, calls me 'Ole Reliable.

Guinea Ryan's hands, covered with sandy hair, showed how the desert had burned them raw, then healed over, but remained raw-colored. He gripped a stubby pipe with thumb and forefinger. Three fingers were missing from the left hand. Freckles, generously spattered, accounted for his name. Everybody from the Mersey to the Yang-tse-Kiang dubbed him "Guinea"—Guinea Ryan, cosmopolite citizen, whose hammer rang around the world, battering rivets from Buenos Ayres to Bombay, and patching boilers from Vicksburg to Vladivostok. His face cracked open in a noiseless laugh: "How's old Paddy Foley, the b'iler-maker on Levee Street?"

Zack switched on all his facial illuminations: "Lordee, Mister, is you 'quainted wid Mister Paddy? I knows 'im real good."

"Sure, I knows Paddy," the globe-trotter answered genially. "Many's the night I've laid flat o' me back in them steamboat b'ilers, holding the hammer whilst Paddy battered rivets from