I'm stuck on you. Will you keep company with me?
I had to laugh, though I knew my furiously red swain was watching me
anxiously.
"Any answer?" again asked the boy. I wrote on a piece of paper the one
word, "Maybe."
People who have called me clever, talented, etc.,--oh, all women
writers get accused of such things!--have not really reckoned with
a certain weak and silly side of my character. If as I proceed with
this chronicle I shock you with the ease and facility with which I
encouraged and accepted and became constantly engaged to men, please
set it down to the fact that I always felt an inability to _hurt_ by
refusing any one who liked me enough to propose to me. I got into
lots of trouble for this,--call it moral lack in me,--but I could not
help it at the time. Why, it's just the same way that I once felt in
a private Catholic hospital, and little Sister Mary Eulalia tried to
convert me. Out of politeness and because I loved _her_, I was within
an ace of acknowledging her faith, or any other faith she might choose.
If you could have seen the broad smile of satisfaction that wreathed
the face of my first stock-yards "mash," you, in my place, would not
have regretted that little crumb of hope that I had tossed him. Yet
I had no more intention of "keeping company" with him that I had of
flying.
It pleases me much to record that on this my first day in the yards I
received three "mash" notes, which one of the girls later told me "was
going it some for fair."
My second note was a pressed flower, accompanied by these touching
lines:
The rose is red; the violet's blue,
Honey's sweet, and so are you!
And so is he, who sends you this,
And when we meet we'll have a kiss.
I don't know who sent me this, but I suspected an office boy in a
neighboring department.
My third note came just about an hour before leaving. It was from
Hermann, and in a sealed envelop. It was as follows:
How about "Buffalo Bill" to-night?
O'Brien leaned over me as I opened the note, deliberately took it from
me, and read it. As he did so, Hermann stealthily pelted him with
tightly chewed wads of paper, though, from his hunched-over position
at his desk, no one would have suspected who was throwing those
pellets. I saw him, however, and he winked at me as if I were in a
conspiracy with him, and as much as to say:
"We'll fix him."
O'Brien, his cigar moving from one side of his mouth to the other,
answered the note for me.
"Nothing doing," was his laconic response to Hermann's invitation, and
he despatched it by Red Top. He let me out with the five-thirty girls
instead of the six, and he said:
"Now step lively, and if you let Hermann catch up with you, I'll fire
you in the morning."
I went flying down the aisle with my heart as light as a feather.
Next to being in love, there is nothing finer in the world, for a
working-girl, than to have a good "job" and to know that some one is
"stuck" on you.