“‘I’ll take that waiter’s place,’ he says, quick.  ’Shall I go right in and begin now?  Don’t stop to argue, man; I say I’ll take it.’

“And he did take it by main strength, pretty nigh.  Every time I’d open my mouth he’d shut it up, and at last I give in, and showed him where he could sleep.

“‘You turn out at five sharp,’ I told him.  ’And you needn’t bother to write no poems while you’re dressin’, neither.’

“‘Good night,’ he answers, brisk.  ’Go, will you, please?  I want to think.’

“I went.  ’Tain’t until an hour later that I remembered he hadn’t asked one word concernin’ the wages.  And next mornin’ he comes to me and suggests that perhaps ’twould be as well if I didn’t tell his real name.  He was pretty sure he’d been away schoolin’ so long that he wouldn’t be recognized.  ‘And incognitos seem to be fashionable here,’ he purrs, soft and gentle.

“I wouldn’t know an incognito if I stepped on one, but the tenor voice of him kind of made me sick.

“‘All right,’ I snaps, sarcastic.  ’Suppose I call you “Willie.”  How’ll that do?’

“‘Do as well as anything, I guess,’ he says.  Didn’t make no odds to him.  If I’d have called him ‘Maud,’ he’d have been satisfied.

“He waited in Annex Number Two, which was skippered by Cap’n Jonadab.  And, for a poet, he done pretty well, so the Cap’n said.

“‘But say, Barzilla,’ asks Jonadab, ’does that Willie thing know the Robinsons?’

“‘Guess not,’ I says.  But, thinkin’ of the way he’d acted when the girl come to the door:  ‘Why?’

“‘Oh, nothin’ much.  Only when he come in with the doughnuts the fust mornin’ at breakfast, I thought Grace sort of jumped and looked funny.  Anyhow, she didn’t eat nothin’ after that.  P’r’aps that was on account of her bein’ out sailin’ the day afore, though.’

“I said I cal’lated that was it, but all the same I was interested.  And when, a day or so later, I see Grace and Willie talkin’ together earnest, out back of the kitchen, I was more so.  But I never said nothin’.  I’ve been seafarin’ long enough to know when to keep my main hatch closed.

“The supplementary season dragged along, but it wa’n’t quite the success it looked like at the start.  The gunnin’ that year was even worse than usual, and excursions and picnics in late September ain’t all joy, by no manner of means.  We shut up the second Annex at the end of the month, and transferred the help to Number One.  Precious few new boarders come, and a good many of the old ones quit.  Them that did stay, stayed on account of the football.  We was edgin’ up toward the end of the series, and our team and the Wapatomac crowd was neck and neck.  It looked as if the final game between them and us, over on their grounds, would settle who’d have the soup tureen.

“Pa Robinson and Parker had been quite interested in Willie when he fust come.  They thought he might play with the eleven, you see.  But he wouldn’t.  Set his foot right down.