“Say think!” commanded Abe.
“I did say it,” the child answered evasively.
“Go on! You didn’t! You didn’t say it right. I’ll bet you can’t say it right. Come on! Let’s hear you: think!”
“T’ink,” Jimmy answered immediately.
“Oh-ho-ho-ho!”—and Abe lifted his grinning face heavenward, saying, “Say! This is rich!”
“Can yuh beat it?” the woman asked.
And, for a moment she continued to look at her son with a glance that was quizzical, tinged with a mocking resignation, and yet with a cold, detached affection. Then her long blue-veined hands twitched nervously and impatiently until all the crusted jewels on her wrists and fingers blazed with light: she sighed sharply and, looking away, dismissed the child from her consideration.
Although the boy saw very little of his mother, Abe watched and guarded over him as tenderly as if he had been his father. If the child were late in coming home from school, if he had not had his lunch before going out to play, if he remained away too long Abe showed his concern and distress very plainly, and he spoke very sharply and sternly at times to the other members of the family if he thought they had been lax in some matter pertaining to the boy.
“Did Jimmy get home from school yet?” he would ask sharply. “Did he eat before he went out again?… Well, why did you let him get away, then, before he had his lunch?… For heaven’s sake! You’re here all day long: you could at least do that much—I can’t be here to watch him all the time, you know—don’t you know the kid ought never to go out to play until he’s had something to eat?”
Eugene saw the child for the first time one day when Abe had taken him home for dinner: Abe, in his crisp neat shirt-sleeves, was seated at the table devouring his food with a wolfish and prowling absorption, and yet in a cleanly and fastidious way, when the child entered. The boy paused in surprise when he saw Eugene: his wheaten sheaf of hair fell down across one eye, one trouser leg had come unbanded at the knee and flapped down to his ankle, and for a moment he looked at Eugene with a rude frank stare of his puggish freckled face.
Abe, prowling upward from his food, glanced at the boy and grinned; then, jerking his head sharply toward Eugene, he said roughly:
“Whatcha think of this guv? Huh?”
