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He was a source of great speculation with them. Some of them had gone so far as to bet he wouldn't live a year. They all seemed grotesque to him, so work-scarred and bent and hairy. Even the men whose names he had known from childhood were queer to him. They seemed shy and distant, too, not like his ideas of them. To Mate they were almost caricatures.
"Haven't you ever warned Jude about it?" demanded Douglas, with a sudden sensing of a debt mothers owed to daughters that Mary might not be discharging. Mary shrank. "O, I couldn't, Doug!" Douglas looked at her scornfully. "I don't see why that isn't your job." Mary rose from her knees. She twisted her work-scarred hands together and looked at the boy with pathetic wistfulness.
And just to prove that she didn't care, Lydia bowed her face in her hands and began to cry. A look of real pain crossed Amos' face. He got up hastily and went to Lydia's side. "Why, my little girl, I thought you were perfectly happy this year. And your clothes look nice to me." He smoothed Lydia's bright hair with his work-scarred hand.
"Peaches, old timer, I didn't think you'd be so easy." "Neither did I," said Swing. "And him a gambler. No wonder he ain't doin' so well." Worried Mrs. Dale raised a work-scarred hand and pushed back a lock of gray hair that had fallen over one eye. "It's a forgery," she said, wretchedly. "I know it's a forgery. He he wouldn't sign such a paper. I know he wouldn't."
Ed Meyers, flushed and eager, his pink face glowing like a peony, talking, arguing, smoking, reasoning, coaxing, with the spur of a fat commission to urge him on; Abel Fromkin, with his peculiarly pallid skin made paler in contrast to the purplish-black line where the razor had passed, showing no hint of excitement except in the restless little black eyes and in the work-scarred hands that rolled cigarette after cigarette, each glowing for one brief instant, only to die down to a blackened ash the next; Emma McChesney, half fascinated, half distrustful, listening in spite of herself, and trying to still a small inner voice a voice that had never advised her ill.
It was pathetic, it was unforgettable, to see these people as they stood beside the rounded, supple, splendid figure of the speaker and took her strong, smooth hand in their work-scarred, leathery palms these women of many children and never-ending work, bent by toil above the wash-tub and the churn, shut out from all things that humanize and make living something more than a brute struggle against hunger and cold.
It was a Bible reader who chanced to come in from the Medical Mission in the Cowgate who thought to look in the fly-leaf of Auld Jock's Bible. "His name is John Gray." He laid the worn little book on Auld Jock's breast and crossed the work-scarred hands upon it. "It's something by the ordinar' to find a gude auld country body in such a foul place."
It was a bumpy cold way to the Morgenroth farm, and she was asleep when they arrived. Here was no glaring new house with a proud phonograph, but a low whitewashed kitchen smelling of cream and cabbage. Adolph Morgenroth was lying on a couch in the rarely used dining-room. His heavy work-scarred wife was shaking her hands in anxiety.
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