“You never can find anything just as you want it,” he conceded, encouragingly, to Justin, “but you can whittle off here and there, and make it do. I had to get along that way at first. You can manage pretty well, only there isn’t any real certainty to it. I got sort of weary”—he pronounced it “weery”—“of sending for steel bars to fit, and then getting a consignment of ’em just two sizes too large, with a polite note saying that they were out of what I wanted, but thought it was best, at any rate, to send me what they had. You don’t want to buck up against that kind of thing too often—not for your own good. So I started up the machinery, and even that goes back on you sometimes.” “Mine has,” said Justin grimly. “Oh, I don’t mean that way—it’s in the way it turns out the stuff. You get so cussed mi-nute nothing seems quite right to you. You get kinder soured even on the material in the rough; the grain is wrong in this, and that hasn’t been worked sufficient, and that t’other weighs too light.” “How long do you guarantee the typometer for?” “For a year.” “We stake out ours for two,—go you one better,—but it’s all rot. You can’t guarantee nothin’ in this world; I know that isn’t grammar, but it kinder seems to mean more’n if ’twas. You can’t guarantee nothin’, not unless you could have the making of the raw material, and then you couldn’t. And you can’t guarantee your workmen, especially when you have to keep changing; I reckon human imperfection’s got to step in somewhere. Talk of skilled labor! That’s what takes the blood out of a man, the everlasting wrench of trying to get ‘skilled labor’ that is skilled. Some of it is so loose-jawed it can’t even chew straight.” “You’re a pessimist,” said Justin, smiling. The other broke into a responsive grin. “Yes, I reckon that’s so; but I don’t even guarantee to be that, steady. Sometimes I get kinder mushy and pleasant, and think the world ain’t a closed-up oyster,—Shakespeare,—but just nice soft cream-cheese that’s ready to be spooned up when you want it. Those are the sort of spells a man’s got to look out for, or he’s likely to find himself up against the rocks, without even an oyster-shell in sight.” “That’s a bad position,” said Justin, and Cater nodded confirmatively. After a moment he said: “Well, I’ll guarantee _that_; I’ve been there.” As he was going, he asked: “How’s Miss Dosia? Pretty well shook up, I suppose.” “Oh, she’s all right now,” said Justin. “She’s been resting for a couple of days. You must come and see her; she will be glad to see a face from home.” “I reckon I’ll wait awhile,” said Cater, “till a face from home’s more of a novelty. She ain’t hankering for a sight of mine now.” And, indeed, Dosia, on being informed of the prospect, showed no great enthusiasm. Balderville and the people there were so far away in the past that she had lost connection with them. And, after all, Leverich met Justin’s explanation cordially.