MILES HARDING’S STORY
Miles knew Roy at once.
“This is Miles, isn’t it?” said Roy in his pleasant way, and he put out
his hand.
“Yes, but wait a minute.”
Miles hurried to the pump near the kitchen door. He gave his hands a
douse of water, dried them quickly on a roller towel in the woodshed,
and then came back to greet the brother of the boy of whom he was so
fond.
“You got the telegram all right then?” he said. “Rex was so weak when
he told me where to send it, I wasn’t sure I’d get it quite right.”
“I want to thank you for all you did for him,” went on Roy. “He’s told
me about it, except the details. He said you’d do that—about what
happened to him after he got out of the train. But don’t let me keep
you from your dinner.”
“I’d rather talk to you than eat,” said Miles frankly.
Mrs. Raynor appeared at this moment and compromised matters by bringing
Miles’ dinner to him out on the side porch. Roy sat by and listened to
the recital, most modestly given, of the facts with which the reader is
already acquainted.
It was time for Miles to return to his work when it was finished, and
Florence came to summon Roy to their own dinner.
“Isn’t he queer?” she said, referring to Miles. “He seems so quiet and
talks so well for a man who was—well, a tramp. I don’t know what else
you could call him. You ought to have seen the clothes he had on when
he first came. Mamma made him burn them.”
“He looks as if he might have an interesting story to tell,” commented
Roy.
“We’ll get him to tell it to-night if your brother is well enough,”
said Mrs. Raynor. “He promised that we should hear it as soon as Rex
was able to listen too.”
Roy took Rex’s dinner up to him, and the twins had an hour to
themselves, during which Rex went more into detail concerning his
experiences with Harrington and his crowd. They compared notes on Harry
Atkins, and then fell to talking of Miles Harding.
“He’s something more than a common tramp,” Rex insisted. “He can read a
little and write some. Isn’t it funny how much he thinks of me, when I
haven’t done a thing for him? Mrs. Raynor lets him come up and sit with
me every evening when his work is done. Of course I didn’t know this
till yesterday, when I came to my senses.”
After the doctor’s visit about three, Rex went to sleep and Roy played
a game of tennis with Florence.
“I don’t want to seem glad that your brother is sick,” she said, “but
it’s awfully nice to have company. I get so lonely when Bert is away.”
That evening they all assembled in Rex’s room—Mrs. Raynor was a widow,
so the family at home consisted only of herself and Florence—and Miles,
seated at the foot of the bed, told the story of his life.
“I don’t know where I was born,” he began. “The first thing I can
remember is living in a tenement house in New York, where I had to
sleep three in a bed with the two Morrisey boys. Mr. Morrisey was a
truckman, and there was five children of them, and I made six. I always
thought I was a Morrisey, too, till one day Jimmy, he got mad at me,
and told me I needn’t talk so big because I was only living on charity.
“I went to his mother and asked her about it, and she told me that it
was true, that I wasn’t really her child, but that she thought as much
of me as if I was, and that there wasn’t any charity about it. But I
wanted to know all about myself, and at last she said that I’d been
given to Mr. Morrisey when I was a wee baby by a friend of his who
couldn’t afford to keep me and who made him vow that he’d never tell
where I came from.
“Jimmy only found it out by accident one night, listening to his father
and mother talking when they thought he was asleep. She said I wasn’t
to feel bad about it; because they thought everything of me.
“But I did feel bad about it. It seemed too hard when the Morriseys had
all they could do to get along they should have one more mouth—and that
not a Morrisey one—to feed.
“I studied as hard as I could at school, so as to try and get through
sooner and go to work and begin to pay them back, but when I was twelve
Mr. Morrisey was kicked to death by a horse and the next year Mrs.
Morrisey married a man who took her and the children out to Dakota to
live.
“She wanted me to go along, but I knew Mr. Rollings didn’t like me, and
besides I wanted to stay East where there was some chance of my finding
out who my parents were. I got a place as cash boy in a Japanese store
and boarded with some people who lived across the hall from where the
Morriseys had their rooms.
“But Mr. Benton used to get drunk and when he was that way he’d beat
me, just for the fun of it, it seemed to me. Then when they cut down
the number of boys employed in the store and I couldn’t find another
place right away, he growled so about my not paying my board that I did
my things up in a bundle one night and hid myself on a canal boat down
at the East River docks.
“The captain was awful mad when he found me after we had got clear up
the North River. He gave me a good thrashing and then said he was going
to drop me overboard. But he didn’t and I stayed on board all that
season, driving mules and being sworn at and kicked and trounced like
any other boy on the canal. I sometimes wonder why I didn’t wear out.
“When navigation closed I was set adrift, and had a hard scrub of it to
get along for a time. I almost starved for a while in Albany, trying to
pick up odd jobs. Then I came near freezing to death.
“Finally I got a place as errand boy in a grocery store and kept that
till some money was missing and they said I took it. I never stole in
my life. Mrs. Morrisey brought me up too well for me to do that. But I
couldn’t prove I didn’t and I had to go. The man said I ought to
consider myself lucky I wasn’t sent to jail.
“After that I had a worse time of it than ever. Whenever I applied for
a position they wanted to know why I had left my last place. And when I
told them, they wouldn’t have anything to do with me.
“Then came the days when sometimes I thought I might as well steal, I
was suffering because I was accused of doing it. When I was very hungry
and saw chances of sneaking apples out of grocery-men’s barrels, it
seemed as if I had almost a right to do it. But I never did.
“Something always turned up to keep me from starving. Once a woman
stopped me in the street and gave me a dollar. She said I looked so
hungry she couldn’t go by me without doing it.
“Another time I was taken sick in one of the parks, something like Rex.
I fell down in a kind of faint, and when I came to I was in a hospital
and I stayed there quite a little while.
“After I got out it was spring and I thought I’d try the country. I
didn’t beg; only asked for work. Sometimes I got it; many more times I
didn’t.
“Now and then if they didn’t give me work they’d offer me milk or a cup
of coffee, so I managed to pull through somehow.
“At last I got back to New York. I’d been wanting to get there again
ever since the thought came to me one day that perhaps some friends of
Mr. Morrisey’s might know something about the man who had given me to
him when I was a baby.
“With a good deal of trouble I found one of them. He was a bricklayer,
and he told me as near as he could remember the man who gave me to Tim
Morrisey was from Philadelphia, and that’s all he knew.
“Then I wanted to go to Philadelphia.
“‘But what good will that do you, Miles?’ Mr. Beesley asked. ‘You can’t
find out any more there, nor as much, as you can here.’
“‘No,’ I told him, ‘but if I’m there maybe somebody else’ll find out
something from passing me in the street.’
“‘That’s an idea, sure enough,’ he said, so I started for Philadelphia,
and that’s how I came to fall in with Rex.”
Miles finished his story with this word. It almost seemed as if he had
done it on purpose, planning for it, as it were. He always spoke the
name with a little pause before it, as if it were something sacred.
Rex had told him to call him by it the day before when he had started
in to address him as “Mr. Pell.” All of Reginald’s striving after
premature manhood had been left in that past which preceded his
experiences in the hotel at New York.