“And supposing he looks like a devil? And supposing all those things continue? Would you be satisfied with six dollars a week?”

Recollections seemed to throng in Williams’s mind at these interrogations, and he answered dubiously. “Of co’se a man who ain’t right in his haid, an’ looks like er devil——But six dollehs——” After these two attempts at a sentence Williams suddenly appeared as an orator, with a great shiny palm waving in the air. “I tell yeh, jedge, six dollehs is six dollehs, but if I git six dollehs fer bo’ding Hennery Johnson, I uhns it! I uhns it!”

“I don’t doubt that you earn six dollars for every week’s work you do,” said the judge.

“Well, if I bo’d Hennery Johnson fer six dollehs er week, I uhns it! I uhns it!” cried Williams, wildly.

XIV

Reifsnyder’s assistant had gone to his supper, and the owner of the shop was trying to placate four men who wished to be shaved at once. Reifsnyder was very garrulous—a fact which made him rather remarkable among barbers, who, as a class, are austerely speechless, having been taught silence by the hammering reiteration of a tradition. It is the customers who talk in the ordinary event.

As Reifsnyder waved his razor down the cheek of a man in the chair, he turned often to cool the impatience of the others with pleasant talk, which they did not particularly heed.

“Oh, he should have let him die,” said Bainbridge, a railway engineer, finally replying to one of the barber’s orations. “Shut up, Reif, and go on with your business!”

Instead, Reifsnyder paused shaving entirely, and turned to front the speaker. “Let him die?” he demanded. “How vas that? How can you let a man die?”

“By letting him die, you chump,” said the engineer. The others laughed a little, and Reifsnyder turned at once to his work, sullenly, as a man overwhelmed by the derision of numbers.

“How vas that?” he grumbled later. “How can you let a man die when he vas done so much for you?”

“ ‘When he vas done so much for you’?” repeated Bainbridge. “You better shave some people. How vas that? Maybe this ain’t a barber shop?”

A man hitherto silent now said, “If I had been the doctor, I would have done the same thing.”

“Of course,” said Reifsnyder. “Any man vould do it. Any man that vas not like you, you—old—flint-hearted—fish.” He had sought the final words with painful care, and he delivered the collection triumphantly at Bainbridge. The engineer laughed.

The man in the chair now lifted himself higher, while Reifsnyder began an elaborate ceremony of anointing and combing his hair. Now free to join comfortably in the talk, the man said: “They say he is the most terrible thing in the world. Young Johnnie Bernard—that drives the grocery wagon—saw him up at Alek Williams’s shanty, and he says he couldn’t eat anything for two days.”

“Chee!” said Reifsnyder.

“Well, what makes him so terrible?” asked another.

“Because he hasn’t got any face,” replied the barber and the engineer in duet.

“Hasn’t got any face!” repeated the man. “How can he do without any face?”