Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/104

 Mrs. Cowgill was fully cognizant of this social division. She knew she was going squarely in the face of public prejudice when she took Tom Laylander to board as a section hand. It did not need Pap's objections, nor Banjo Gibson's scorn, to tell her this. But she liked the boy. She did not have the heart to hurt him by pointing out an inferiority that was not his, that he did not and could not feel.

But she would draw the line with Tom. No other jerry could sit at her table or sleep in her beds. Railroad men washed up and put on clean collars and clean clothes before coming to supper. They went out in the morning to the shops looking like gentlemen, their greasy garments in neat rolls under their arms. She knew how the jerries at Ryan's came and went in the same clothes day after day, sneaking a bar of soap from Mrs. Ryan on Sunday to wash their shirts and overalls in the river. Nobody could blame a railroad man for refusing to sit with such a crowd at the table. Goosie would not wait on men like that.

It was a big concession, therefore, to lodge Tom Laylander after he had fallen to the low estate of section hand. It was not mercenary; she had plenty of boarders without him. It was nothing in the world but that assertion of tenderness and humanity that dies so hard in people's breasts, living in most of us long after we believe we have smothered it in the interest of our business and social success.

Tom came to supper as fresh as a pink, tidy in a clean shirt and, his cougar-skin vest hiding his