The boss was a Massachusetts man and new to Nut Street, and Fairfax,
when he took the paper with his orders from Rainsford's hand, saw for
the first time in months a man of his own class, sitting in the
revolving chair before the desk where his papers and schedules and
ledgers were filed. The man's clothes were too thin for the season, his
linen was old and his appearance meagre, and in his face with its sunken
cheeks, the drooping of the eyes and the thinness of the brow, were the
marks of the sea of life and its waste, and the scars of the storm. A
year ago Fairfax would have passed Rainsford by as a rather
pitiful-looking man of middle age.
The boss, his thin hand opening and shutting over a small book which
looked like a daily ledger, regarded the engineer in his red shirt as
Fairfax paused.
"Irish, I expect? Your name, Fairfax, is Irish. I understand you've had
a hard blow this year, been sick and lost your mother."
At the quiet statement of this sacred fact Fairfax started painfully,
his face flushed.
"He would not have spoken to me like that," he thought, "if he had not
imagined me a working man."
"Work is the best friend a young man can have," Rainsford went on; "it
is a great safeguard. I take it that you are about thirty?"
"Twenty-three," said Fairfax, shortly.
His report was brief. Just then his fireman came in, a black-haired,
tall young fellow with whom Fairfax knew he should never sing "Mia
Maddelena."