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Updated: July 29, 2025
He sat up, looking dazed and ludicrous: "Wher's the little feller?" "I got him," panted the breathless mother, shaking the child from side to side as she showed it to him. "He's all right," cried the engineer, "but I hit you. Where are you hurt?" "I ain't hurt no place," said Mallston, crawling up on all fours, "'cept wher' my back and head hit the fence."
"We ain't got no money," replied Bill Stillman, the smallest but readiest-tongued. "You got money, Bill," retorted Leonard Price, a parchment-colored wisp of nineteen who had recently become a widower. "I got to git clo'es with it if I hev'. There's Mallston: git him to set for his picter."
The rabble had begun their morning business of pitching horseshoes, but his interest was held by that little child its fresh clothes, rings of black hair and pomegranate coloring. The artist, having placed his camera, was in the farther room preparing his plate. When he came out and was in the act of closing the door he noticed Mallston, and asked, "Do you want a job?"
I get a living, too, such as it is, which I shouldn't do if I set up as an artist. Look here!" He turned over his book and showed an etching of Mallston stepping across the common carrying his youngest, with the four older children at his heels. One had sprawled, and was evidently lifting a howl to the paternal ear. They both laughed at it.
The morning was so clear that every object stood in startling relief. A plume of steam far up the leafy railroad vista heralded the Peru express's lightning passage through the town. Scarcely a lounger was left on the platform. Mallston had a job of cleaning the cellar for the storekeeper, and at intervals appeared from its gaping doors with a basket of decayed potatoes on his shoulders.
But Mallston looked into his eyes with a preoccupied mind, and said, as to the only person present who would appreciate the depth of the remark, "I couldn't a-stood that, by jeeminy!" Tears stood in his big bovine eyes. The group dispersed, many glad to have enjoyed such a genuine sensation, Mrs.
The photographer mentally limned him: a bushy, low-browed head and dark, reddish, full-lipped face, bearded; muscle massed upon his arms and tatter-clothed legs; a deep, prominent chest; hands large, black, powerful; the whole man advancing with a lightness which in some barbaric conqueror would have been called dignified grace. Mallston had nothing to answer for himself.
A generous family and scant provision for it being the mode in Fairfield, however, Mallston may not have seen his desperate position, especially with summer and harvest wages coming. Just now he was out of a job, having finished a ditching contract, and his black, speculative eyes looked anxiously at the photographer.
The cart upset, and the baby sprawled, crying, between the rails, while his sister fled crying toward home. This whole occurrence was a flash: it seemed to the spectators they had barely started forward with their blood curdling, the engine had but screamed, and Mallston was merely seen dropping a basket of potatoes and leaping with upright hair and starting eyes, before the whole thing was over.
She went after pails of water and left her children playing beside the railroad-track; their tattered and ludicrous appearance bespoke her unskilfulness with the needle; she was said to have scalded the eldest boy with a skilletful of hot water in which she had soaked bacon, pouring it out of the window on his head. But she probably did as well as she knew how, and Mallston did much better.
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