VIII

The six months which followed Richard’s installment in the office at Slocum’s Yard were so crowded with novel experience that he scarcely noted their flight.  The room at the Durgins, as will presently appear, turned out an unfortunate arrangement; but everything else had prospered.  Richard proved an efficient aid to Mr. Simms, who quietly shifted the pay-roll to the younger man’s shoulders.  This was a very complicated account to keep, involving as it did a separate record of each employee’s time and special work.  An ancient bookkeeper parts lightly with such trifles when he has a capable assistant.  It also fell to Richard’s lot to pay the hands on Saturdays.  William Durgin blinked his surprise on the first occasion, as he filed in with the others and saw Richard posted at the desk, with the pay-roll in his hand and the pile of greenbacks lying in front of him.

“I suppose you’ll be proprietor next,” remarked Durgin, that evening, at the supper table.

“When I am, Will,” answered Richard cheerily, “you will be on the road to foreman of the finishing shop.”

“Thank you,” said Durgin, not too graciously.  It grated on him to play the part of foreman, even in imagination, with Dick Shackford as proprietor.  Durgin could not disconnect his friend from that seedy, half-crestfallen figure to whom, a few months earlier, he had given elementary instruction on the Marble Workers’ Association.

Richard did not find his old schoolmate so companionable as memory and anticipation had painted him.  The two young men moved on different levels.  Richard’s sea life, now that he had got at a sufficient distance from it, was a perspective full of pleasant color; he had a taste for reading, a thirst to know things, and his world was not wholly shut in by the Stillwater horizon.  It was still a pitifully narrow world, but wide compared with Durgin’s, which extended no appreciable distance in any direction from the Stillwater hotel.  He spent his evenings chiefly there, returning home late at night, and often in so noisy a mood as to disturb Richard, who slept in an adjoining apartment.  This was an annoyance; and it was an annoyance to have Mrs. Durgin coming to him with complaints of William.  Other matters irritated Richard.  He had contrived to replenish his wardrobe, and the sunburn was disappearing from his hands, which the nature of his occupation left soft and unscarred.  Durgin was disposed at times to be sarcastic on these changes, but always stopped short of actual offense; for he remembered that Shackford when a boy, amiable and patient as he was, had had a tiger’s temper at bottom.  Durgin had seen it roused once or twice, and even received a chance sweep of the paw.  Richard liked Durgin’s rough wit as little as Durgin relished Richard’s good-natured bluntness.  It was a mistake, that trying to pick up the dropped thread of old acquaintance.