When the Floater paid me another dollar and a half that night he told me that if I worked like a dog, was as meek as a mouse, and "didn’t get no labor rot into my nut" I could have Clancy’s job as a regular thing. But by this time I was beginning to understand him. I have already called him a terrier, and a terrier he was, with a terrier’s bark, but with a terrier’s fundamental friendliness. If you patted him, he wagged his tail. True, he wagged it unwillingly, ungraciously, and with a fond belief that you didn’t know he was wagging it at all; but the fact that he did wag it was enough for me.
It was enough for us all. There was not a man among the "luggers" who didn’t understand him, nor among the salesmen either, as I came to understand.
"Dee ye know how to take that little scalpeen? He’s like wan of thim Graaks or Eytalians that’s got a quare talk of their own, but you know you can put it into our talk and make it mane somethin’. Wance I was at a circus where a monkey what looked like a little ould man talked his kind o’ talk, and it made sinse. Well, that’s like the Floater. He’s like the monkey what can’t talk nothin’ but monkey-talk; but glory be to God! he manes the same thing as a man. Don’t ye moind him, Brogan. When he talks his talk, you talk it to yerself in yer own talk, and ye’ll kape yer timper and get everything straight."
This kindly advice was given me by Denis Gallivan, the oldest of the porters, and a sort of dean of our corps. Small, wiry, as strong as a horse, with a wizened, leathery face that looked as if it had been dried and tanned in a hot sunshine, there was a yearning in his blue-black eyes like that which some of the old Italian masters put into the eyes of saints. Denis, Bridget, and the Finn composed what I may call the permanent staff, the two others, excluding myself, being invariably restless chaps who, like Clancy, came for a few weeks and went off again. With the three workers named I made a fourth, henceforth helping to carry the responsibility of the house on my shoulders.
It was a good place, with pleasant work. Two or three times I could have had promotion and a raise in pay, but I had reasons of my own for staying where I was.