'No, no; I mustn't do that, Bess,' replied Jenkins, drawing the coat still more closely round him, and ramming the hat still further down over his eyes by a blow on the crown. 'Whatever are you thinking about? They know Warren perfectly well here, and if they either took me for him, and found out I'm somebody else, or else if they discovered that there's anybody about so uncommon like him as I am, they might have their suspicions roused, and set to look for him directly. And that would not pay, Bess, my dear, neither on his account nor on my own; for though I don't suppose they could do me much harm, and for certain they couldn't make me out to be up to any--deliberate harm, I mean--of course, it ain't altogether on the square, this lay I'm on for Warren. And, then, if he should be up to anything out-of-the-way-fishy, which I'm sometimes tempted to suspect, and they find out that he is not at Chicago while he's pretending to be there, even suppose they couldn't molest me at all, they certainly could stop _his_ little game; and in our present circumstances, Bess, my girl, we must remember that stopping his little game means stopping our rations.' 'Yes, yes,' said Mrs. Jenkins mournfully, twisting the end of her apron about in her fingers in a way habitual to her in perplexity. 'I know that, Eph; and yet I cannot tell you how uneasy and wretched I am feeling, and have been feeling ever since we parted, and you went to undertake this dark and dirty business for Warren. Dark we know it is, and dirty I cannot but suspect it to be. O Eph, could you but give it up? If you only would be satisfied to stick regularly to some kind of fixed work, and let us live respectable, however poor!' 'We couldn't easily be poorer than we've been when we lived disrespectable,' said Jenkins, with a kind of surly good humour; 'and I think I could stick to work if only the pay would stick _to me_--but where is it to be had? You can't have forgotten, Bess, how hard I have had to work in this place, and how I never got any for a constancy--yes, yes, I know what your shake of the head means, and you've good right to shake it, I'm not going for a moment to deny that--and how, then, Warren was always giving me, or getting somebody else to get me, odd jobs. Well, one can't work steadily at odd jobs; it ain't in the nature of things, nor yet in one's own nature. If one's business is unsteady, one must be unsteady with it; and where any thing except odd jobs is to come from, especially if I vex Warren, and he shunts me off in earnest, I cannot guess. Can you?'