The next two or three nights were occasions for the interchange of confidence. During the days the new pals saw little of each other, and sometimes nothing at all. With the late afternoon they could "clean themselves," and take a little relaxation. For this there was no great range of opportunity. Relaxation for Lemuel Honeybun had hitherto run in directions from which he now felt himself cut off. He knew of no others, while the boy knew of none of any kind.
"I tell yer, Goody," Tom overheard, through the open door of the room back of Pappa's, one day while he was climbing the stairs, "I ain't a-goin' to go while I've got this job on me hands. The Lord knows I didn't seek it. It's just one of them things that's give yer as a dooty, and I'm goin' to put it through. When Quidmore's come back, and it's all over, I'll be right on the job with the old gang again; but till he does it's nix. Yer can't mean to think that I don't miss the old bunch. Why, I'd give me other eye...."
Tom heard no more; but the tone of regret worried him. True, if he wanted to break the bond this might be his chance. On the other hand, the thought of being again without a friend appalled him. While waiting in the hope that Quidmore might come back,
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 the present arrangement was at least a cosy one. Nevertheless, he felt it due to his spirit of independence to show that he could stand alone. He waited till they were again lying feet to feet by the wall, and the air through the open window was cool enough to allow of their being comfortable, before he felt able to take an offhand, man-to-man tone.
"You know, Honey, if you want to beat it back to your old crowd, I can get along all right. Don't hang round here on my account."
"Lord love you, Kiddy, I know how to sackerfice meself. If I'm to be yer next o' kin, I'll be it and be damned. Done 'arder things than this in me life, and pulled 'em off, too. I'll stick to yer, kid, as long as yer wants me, if I never have another nice time in my life, and never see another quart bottle."
The pathos of the life for which he might be letting himself in turned his thoughts backward over his career.
"Why, if I'd 'a stuck at not puttin' others before meself I might still 'a been a gasfitter in Liverpool, Eng. That's where I was born. True 'eart-of-oak Englishman I was. Some people thinks they can tell it in the way I talk. Been over 'ere so long, though, seems to me I 'andle the Yankee end of it pretty good. Englishman I met the other day—steward on one of the Cunarders he was—said he wouldn't 'a knowed me from a born New Yorker. Always had a gift for langwidges. Used to know a Frenchman onst; and I'll be 'anged if I wasn't soon parley-vooin' with him till he'd thought I was his mother's son. But it's doin' my dooty by others as has brought me
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 where I am, and I don't make no complaint of it. Job over at the Gansevoort whenever I wants one, which ain't always. Quite a tidy little sum in the savings bank in Brooklyn. Friends as'll stick by me as long as I'll stick by them. And if I hadn't lost me eye—but how was I to know that that low-down butler was a-layin' for me at the silver-pantry door, and' d let me have it anywhere he could 'it me?... And when that eyeball cracked, why, I yelled fit to bring the whole p'lice-force in New York right atop o' me."
Tom was astounded. "But you said you lost your eye saving a young lady's life."
Mr. Honeybun's embarrassment lasted no more than the time needed for finding the right words.
"Oh, did I? Well, that was the other side of it. Yer've heard that there's always two sides to a story, haven't yer? I can't tell yer both sides to onst, now can I?"
He judged it best, however, to revert to the autobiographical. The son of a dock hand in Liverpool, he had been apprenticed to a gasfitter at the age of seventeen.
"But my genius was for somethink bigger. I didn't know just what it'd be, but I could see it ahead o' me, all wuzzy-like. After a bit I come to know it was to fight agin the lor o' proputty. Used to seem to me orful to look around and see that everythink was owned by somebody. Took to goin' to meetin's, I did. Found out that me and me class was the uninherited. 'Gord,' I says to meself then, 'I'll inherit somethink, or I'll bust all Liverpool.' Well, I did
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 inherit somethink—inherited a good warm coat what a guy had left to mark his seat in the Midland Station. Got away with it, too. Knowin' it was mine as much as his, I walks up and throws it over my arm. Ten minutes later I was a-wearin' of it in Lime Street. That was the beginnin', and havin' started in, I begun to inherit quite a lot o' things. 'Nothink's easier,' says I, 'onst you realizes that the soul o' man is free, and that nothink don't belong to nobody.' Fightin' for me class, I was. Tried to make 'em see as they ought to stop bein' the uninherited, and get a move on—and the first thing I know I was landed in Walton jail. You're not asleep, Kiddy, are you?"
Not being asleep, Tom came in for the rest of the narrative. Released from Walton jail, Mr. Honeybun had "made tracks" for America.
"Wanted to git away from a country where everythink was owned, and find the land o' the free. But free! Lord love yer, I hadn't been landed a hour before I see everythink owned over 'ere as much as it is in a back'ard country like old England. Let me tell you this, Kid. Any man that thinks that by comin' to America he'll git somethink for nothink'll find hisself sold. I ain't had nothink except what I've worked for—or collared. Same old lor o' proputty what's always been a injustice to the pore. Had to begin all over agin the same old game of fightin' it. But what's a few months in chokey when you're doin' it for yer feller creeters, to show 'em what their rights is?"
A few nights later Tom was startled by a new point of view as to his position.
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"I've been thinkin', Kiddy, that since yer used to be a State ward, yer'll have to be a State ward agin, if the State knows you're knockin' round loose."
The boy cried out in alarm. "Oh, but I won't be. I'll kill myself first."
He could not understand this antipathy, this horror. In a mechanical way the State had been good to him. The Tollivants had been good to him, too, in the sense that they had not been unkind. But he could not return to the status. It was the status that dismayed him. In Harfrey it had made him the single low-caste individual in a prim and high-caste world, giving everyone the right to disdain him. They couldn't help disdaining him. They knew as well as he did that in principle he was a boy like any other; but by all the customs of their life he was a little pariah. Herding with thieves and murderers, it was still possible to respect himself; but to go back and hang on to the outer fringe of the organized life of a Christian society would have ravaged him within. He said so to Honeybun energetically.
"That's the way I figured that yer'd feel. So long as you're on'y waitin'—or yer can say that you're on'y waitin'—till yer pop comes back, it won't matter much. It'll be when school begins that it'll go agin yer. There's sure to be some pious woman sneepin' round that'll tell someone as you're not in school when you're o' school age, and then, me lad, yer'll be back as a State ward on some down-homer's farm."
Tom lashed the bed in the darkness. "I won't go! I won't go!"
"That's what I used to say the first few times they
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 pinched me; but yer'll jolly well have to go if they send yer. Now what I was thinkin' is this. It's in New York State that yer'd be a State ward. If you was out o' this State there'd be all kinds o' laws that couldn't git yer back again. Onst when I'd been doin' a bit o' socializin' in New Jersey, and slipped back to Manhattan—well, you wouldn't believe the fuss it took to git me across the river when the p'lice got wind it was me. Never got me back at all! Thing died out before they was able to fix up all the coulds and couldn'ts of the lor."
He allowed the boy to think this over before going on with his suggestion.
"Now if you and me was to light out together to another State, they wouldn't notice that we'd gone before we was safe beyond their clutches. If we was to go to Boston, say! Boston's a good town. I worked Boston onst, me and a chap named...."
The boy felt called on to speak. "I wouldn't be a socialist, not if it gave me all Boston for my own."
The statement, coming as it did, had the vigor of an ultimatum. Though but a repetition of what he had said a few days before, it was a repetition with more force. It was also with more significance, fundamentally laying down a condition which need not be discussed again.
After long silence Mr. Hon............