Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/112

100 that 's been tryin' to get a mash note in to Milly," Sutley looked up at him with a startled round eye.

Burls grinned. "I got him goin' all right."

"Say," Sutley protested, "what 's the use o' stirrin' up dirt? We 're all right the way we are. I ain't stuck on the circus. It's a lot cozier here when it rains."

"Rains!"

"Well, I ain't got three fingers o' suet on my ribs, like you, an' I 'd just as leave keep dry."

Burls put aside the objection with a disingenuous laugh. "How about settin' out on the back stoop o' the sleeper, wavin' yer legs in a forty-mile breeze?"

"How about the night the menagerie jumped the track an' we bumped into the ditch on top of 'em?"

"Aw, add it up! Add it up! You leave this to me, Hen. What we want 's a contrac' fer two-hundred per apiece." The call boy shrieked up the iron staircase: "Henreys!"

Burls answered, "Yaw right!"

They attacked the final details of their costumes in the silence of preoccupied haste, as busy with their thoughts as they were with their buttons; for—from the futile discussion that the call-boy had ended—an impending crisis had made itself apparent, plain to both, outwardly ignored by both, but secretly, to both, exciting and decisive.