Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/110

98 melancholy wide grin of a skull. His long arms were as thin as cross-bones. Barelegged, as solemn as Death mending his shroud, he sewed and said nothing, while the fat Burls perspired and complained.

And the sum of Burls' complaint was that spring was here; that summer was coming; that Sutley and he might be out with a circus, dressing in a shady tent, with grass under their feet, eating like farm-hands, and sleeping the sleep of tired tramps while the railroad train rocked them across cool country—instead of stewing all day in this condemned "sweatshop," eating like condemned cockatoos in little footy cages, and trying to pound their ears at night in condemned two-by-fours, while all the kids and all the cats and all the married couples of the quarter "scrapped an' yowled" together "on th' other side o' the plaster."

"And besides," he said, in a semi-humorous exaggeration of disgust, "these N' York crowds 're froze all the time. I don't want to dally with 'em. They 're a bunch o' yaps that on'y sit an' grin at the chorus girls. You have to near break yer neck to shake a laugh out of 'em. I 'm sick of it—grindin' through the same ol' gags twice a day. Why don't they turn us loose the way they do in a circus, an' let 's raise a laugh any way we can?"

He shut his lips long enough to mark them out, with vermilion, in a fixed grin that curled up into his cheeks. He reddened his nose end. He drew barbaric rings around his eyes. And then he continued, in a voice of self-conscious indignation: