Motion Picture Classic (Jan-Dec 1916)

0/ERALLP' ^2Q>r v^Ay ‘^Pozwe/f “Good-morning, Finnegan. Glad you’re able to be at work today. There’s a lot to be done, and we’re a bit shy on picks.” The man, a hulking brute of a fellow with undershot jaw and red veins in his eyeballs, cast an angry glance at his foreman, and a spark sprang far back in his small porcine eyes. “I was sick yesterday,” he said, with a threat in his voice — ‘‘had a cramp in my stomick. I’m tellin’ yer.” "And the day before, and the day before that,” said Drew, quietly. “You must be more careful what you eat, Finnegan — and drink.” He looked coolly into the angry face at his side. “I've warned you once already. This makes twice. Next time you lay off to go on a drunk, I shall fire you.” Without waiting to hear Finnegan’s muttered answer, Drew turned away, but the shadow of an indefinable trouble lay over his thoughts. For some reason the slender girl-figure had faded into the background, to make room for a suave, faultlessly dressed man-image with shiny hair above a shiny forehead and eyes that shifted unpleasantly in a handsome face. He had forgotten to remember Walter Daniels, Bettina’s attorney and the trustee of her fortune until she should marry — Daniels, who had come with the girl from the East to visit her father’s property, and who was, the camp predicted sagely, “a wise guy with an eve on the main chance.” And, after all, why should he think of Daniels’ courtship so scornfully, when the same sordid motive might be attributed as fairly to his own daydreaming? Drew clenched his big jaw fiercely and the muscles tautened thruout his great frame. “The foreman of her works, at two hundred a month,” he muttered in self-scorn. “She pays my wages ; I mustn’t forget that. But, Lord, what a woman she is, too !” His eyes dreamed, then grew somber. “I must forget that,” he said. “I will forget that.” Behind him, Finnegan bared his teeth in yellow-fanged mirth. “Crow yer d — d little cock-a-doodle erbert Drew took the last twilight steps that led from the pitchy windings of the tunnel into the sooty sunshine of the construction camp, and filled his great bellows of lungs with the outer air. His steady eyes bore the impact of the daylight without blinking; his grave, rather grim, young face gave no faint clue to the ticking of his thoughts behind the broad forehead. And yet he was puzzled — puzzled and harried as he had never been before in all his rational twentynine years ; and his reason for leaving the spitting drill and hissing oiltorches in the tunnel was to find a quiet place where he could take out these same perplexing problems in decent privacy, examine them reasonably, and decide exactly what disposition to make of them. His chief problem was visible this moment beyond the litter of lifting cranes and slab shacks, standing in a blur of pink dimity in the doorway of Mother Malone’s boarding-house. With the far-sighted eyes of imagination, Drew could see now the fluff of honey-colored hair, the wide, set eyes of a blue like that of violets that have been drenched with dew, and the wilful red lips that were Bettina Warren's character index. A man might, he thought whimsically, flirt with witcha-way hair like hers — might love the wistful flower-eyes; but the straight, clear-cut little lips called for respect and even a little awe, or — the slow color swept his brown cheeks — for kisses that a man has saved thru the long, clean years of his youth for the one woman. “Hullo, Overalls!” Drew did not turn at the salutation that came with startling suddenness close to his shoulder, but a frown drew his eyebrows together. Familiar as the title was, the young foreman of the Warren Construction Company permitted, even encouraged, its use by the several hundred hands under him. It was only on the lips of this one man that “Overalls” became a subtle insult instead of a tribute of affectionate respect. But he only answered evenly : (Forty -five)