“You never neither.  You said—­”

The depot master held up his hand.  “Don’t both talk at once,” he commanded.  “Set down and be peaceful, can’t you.  That’s right.  What about this Effie, Barzilla?”

“Now look here!” protested Stitt.

“Shut up, Bailey!  Who was Effie, Barzilla?”

“She was third assistant roustabout and table girl at the Old Home House,” said Wingate triumphantly.  “Got another cigar, Sol?  Thanks.  Yes, this Effie had never worked out afore and she was greener’n a mess of spinach; but she was kind of pretty to look at and—­”

“Ah, ha!” crowed Captain Bailey, “here comes the heart confessions.  Want to look out for these old bachelors, Sol.  Fire away, Barzilla; let us know the worst.”

“I took a fancy to her, in a way.  She got in the habit of tellin’ me her troubles and secrets, me bein’ old enough to be her dad—­”

“Aw, yes!” this from Stitt, the irrepressible.  “That’s an old gag.  We know—­”

“Will you shut up?” demanded Captain Sol.  “Go on, Barzilla.”

“Me bein’ old enough to be her dad,” with a glare at Captain Bailey, “and not bein’ too proud to talk with hired help.  I never did have that high-toned notion.  ’Twa’n’t so long since I was a fo’mast hand.

“So Effie told me a lot about herself.  Seems she’d been over to the Cattle Show at Ostable one year, and she was loaded to the gunwale with some more or less facts that a fortune-tellin’ specimen by the name of the ‘Marvelous Oriental Seer’ had handed her in exchange for a quarter.

“‘Yup,’ says she, bobbin’ her head so emphatic that the sky-blue ribbon pennants on her black hair flapped like a loose tops’l in a gale of wind.  ‘Yup,’ says she, ’I b’lieve it just as much as I b’lieve anything.  How could I help it when he told me so much that has come true already?  He said I’d seen trouble, and the dear land knows that’s so! and that I might see more, and I cal’late that’s pretty average likely.  And he said I hadn’t been brought up in luxury—­’

“‘Which wa’n’t no exaggeration neither,’ I put in, thinkin’ of the shack over on the Neck Road where she and her folks used to live.

“‘No,’ says she; ’and he told me I’d always had longin’s for better and higher things and that my intellectuals was above my station.  Well, ever sence I was knee high to a kitchen chair I’d ruther work upstairs than down, and as for intellectuals, ma always said I was the smartest young one she’d raised yet.  So them statements give me consider’ble confidence.  But he give out that I was to make a journey and get money, and when that come true I held up both hands and stood ready to swaller all the rest of it.’

“‘So it come true, did it?’ says I.