“All the way down to the docks the engineer fellow was telling me, as well as he could for running and dodging from shadow to shadow of the squatty houses, and looking up and down each street that we had to cross, what I was to do when I got to New Orleans. But I didn’t hear a word he said: I was so busy thinking how nice it was to have a man like that taking care of me--and how strong his arm was. If I’d stopped thinking about his arm and thought more about what he was saying to me, I’d have been better off. But you never are foxy at the time that you ought to be. “He swung me aboard a ship just as the gangplank was drawn up. All he had time to do was to push a card into my hand. “‘Here’s my address,’ he said. ‘Let me know how you are coming on, and where you are.’ And then he said: ‘_Hasta la mañana!_’ which I’d picked up in the dance hall, and knew meant that he was going to see me some time. “The captain was looking over the rail of the ship. The engineer fellow threw him a little package twisted up in a piece of paper that he tore from a notebook; and he said something to the captain in Spanish. “So there I was, on a banana ship--in my dance dress and one heel off my slippers, and the engineer fellow’s coat over my shoulders! I must have struck that captain dumb! But I didn’t care. I was too busy staring at the engineer fellow back there on the dock. “A puff of wind came up and blew the card that he had given me out of my hand and down into the water. I leaned way over the rail and saw it sucked under by the churning of the machinery. And then I remembered that I hadn’t read it. I’d been too busy staring at him to read his note. I ran after the captain and asked him if he knew the name of the fellow. ‘No,’ he said, ‘he’d never seen the chap before.’ I took the fellow’s coat off and looked through the pockets to see if there wasn’t another card in one of them. But there wasn’t a thing except some papers scrawled all over with his figuring--his mining work, I guess. “That’s the way I lost out. But I’ve always kept the coat. It reminds me that I once met a good man. “When we got to New Orleans with those bananas, I was still a long way from home. And I didn’t have a cent of money; my purse was in the trunk that they’d been going to send up to the dance hall at Colon. I said to the captain the day we made port: “‘I don’t know how I am to pay you, unless you wait until I get a job in this town.’ “The captain told me that the engineer fellow had paid my passage, and fifty dollars over for me to get a start on--buy some clothes to wear when I was out looking for a job. That was a real man, that fellow! And as I didn’t know his name having been such a fool about not reading his card for looking at him, I couldn’t hunt him up to pay it back. So I burn candles for him.” Silence--except for the noise of the jazz band and the shuffling feet. Kirwin broke this silence. He leaned nearer the girl; his voice was very kind as he spoke to her.