Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/153

Rh as to be sure, "I was half paralyzed with astonishment at hearing him reply in a whisper, "Be quiet, Will! She 's asleep." Slowly and carefully he came down the coach steps, holding in his arms a limp and shapeless bundle, from which hung down two thin, little gray legs, with feet much too big for them, and made bigger still by clumsy shoes.

"Good heavens, Jim," I exclaimed, "what is it? where did you pick her up?" I added, for I saw tangled yellow curls straggling over his arm from the folds of the old plaid shawl in which the poor little thing was rolled.

"Hush, hush! Look after him, will you?" he said, nodding his head toward a man who sat in the corner of the coach, and made no motion to get out. The driver took hold of him roughly and shook him. He swayed helplessly to and fro, but did not speak nor open his eyes; horrible fumes of rum came from his wide-open mouth. He was drunk and asleep. We carried him into the house as if he had been a log, and laid him on a buffalo-robe on the floor in the corner of the office. The loungers turned their slow dull eyes on him. One said:—

"Drunk, ain't he?" with a slight emphasis of surprise on the verb.

"Wall, yes, I sh'd say he wus," replied a second, the least talkative of the group, also conveying his sense of the unusualness of the incident by