This afforded Miss Hatch and Culpepper an opportunity to titter. I did not look at them, but addressed myself to the pilot. "I confess that my meaning might have been clearer, but behind it lies a sufficient cause for its utterance." He put down his knife and looked at me helplessly, shook his head as if puzzled, and fell to eating with this not very comforting observation: "Jerk me out of bed any time of night, along here, and I can tell you where I am, and I am pretty good at foreseeing a change in the channel, but once in a while I strike a thing that I can't figger out, and I reckon you've just handed me one." Miss Hatch was now so occupied with feeding her dog that she had no time to titter at my discomfiture, but I caught sight of Culpepper's hateful and invidious smile. The meal was finished in silence, and I thought that the pilot had forgotten my clouded remark, but when he had resumed his place at the wheel, he cut his sharp old eye at me and said: "But there are a good many things I can see, and one of them is, that you and them other show folks don't get along together very well." "It's their fault," I replied. "Of course," he rejoined, giving me a mere glimpse of his old eye, and this time it was not merely shrewd--it was rascally. "I have done my best to merit their friendship," I said, somewhat sharply. "But they spurn me, they insinuate that I am an elephant on the manager's hands, when you yourself have been kind enough to tell me that my part of the performance was--" "Good, first-rate," he broke in. "But in the play you almost have a set of love jimjams on account of that woman, and let her reform you, and all that sort of thing. It beats me," he added, shaking his head. "I don't see how a man can love and cavort with a woman one minute, and hate her the next. I pass, when it comes to that." "The stage is a strange world," I replied. "Yes, seems so. Hard way to earn money, hugging someone you don't like. Why, I know a woman I wouldn't hug for a thousand dollars. You appear to be a man of fair average sense. Why don't you go into some other business--why don't you go to work?" "Work!" I cried, and I laughed so loud that a half naked boy on the shore tossed up his hat and shouted a salute to my merriment. With his face hard set, and with his eyes sweeping the river, he waited for my attention, and then he said: "Yes, work. Of course it's all right for idle and shiftless fellows to go around this way, but it strikes me--of course I don't know--but it strikes me that if you were to get down to it, you might make something of yourself. It would be all right if you could make a great actor out of yourself, for then it would be worth your while, but always to be an under dog in the fight--" "You are not a flatterer," I broke in.