“And very well they turn out,” sneered Blecker.

“She is a woman,” said the Captain, blushing,—­differently from the lady, however.

“And if she is?” turning suddenly.  “She has the nature of a Bowery rough.  Pah, McKinstry!  Sexes stand alike with me.  If a woman’s flesh is weaker-grained a bit, what of that?  Whoever would earn esteem must work for it.”

The Captain said nothing, stammered a little, then, hoisting his foot on a stump, tied his shoe nervously.

Blecker smiled, a queer, sorrowful smile, as if, oddly enough, he felt sorry for himself.

“I’d like to think of women as you do, Mac,” he said.  “You never knew many?”

“Only two, until now,—­my mother and little Sarah.  They’re gone now.”

Sarah?  The Doctor was silent a moment, thinking.  He had heard of a sister of McKinstry’s, sick for years with some terrible disease, whom he had nursed until the end.  She was Sarah, most likely.  Well, that was what his life had been given up for, was it?  There was a twitching about McKinstry’s wide mouth:  Paul looked away from him a moment, and then, glancing furtively back, began again.

“No, I never knew my mother or sister, Mac.  The great discovery of this age is woman, old fellow!  I’ve been, knocked about too much not to have lost all delusions about them.  It did well enough for the crusading times to hold them as angels in theory, and in practice as idiots; but in these rough-and-tumble days we’d better give ’em their places as flesh and blood, with exactly such wants and passions as men.”

The Captain never argued.

“I don’t know,” he said, dryly.

After that he jogged on in silence, glancing askance at the masculine, self-assertant figure of his companion,—­at the face, acrid, unyielding, beneath its surface-heat:  ruminating mildly to himself on what a good thing it was for him never to have known any but old-fashioned women.  This Blecker, now, had been made by intercourse with such women as those he talked of:  he came from the North.  The Captain looked at him with a vague, moony compassion:  the usual Western vision of a Yankee female in his head,—­Bloomer-clad, hatchet-faced, capable of anything, from courting a husband to commanding a ship. (It is all your fault, genuine women of New England!  Why don’t you come among us, and know your country, and let your country know you?  Better learn the meaning of Chicago than of Venice, for your own sakes, believe me.)

They were near the town now, the road crossing a railroad-track, where the hill, chopped apart for the grade, left bare the black stratum of coal, tinged here and there with a bloody brown and whitish shale.

“Hillo! this means iron,” said the Doctor, climbing up the bank, cat-like, to break off a bit; “and here an odd formation, Mac.  Take it in to old Gurney.”

The Captain cleaned his spectacles with piece of chamois-leather, put them on, folded the leather and replaced it in its especial place in his pocket, before he took the bit of rock.