"I shan't!" cried the boy. "Go and work like me. You're big, and you
called Mr. Reybold mean. Haven't you got a wife or little girl, or
nobody to work for? You ought to work for yourself, anyhow. Oughtn't
he, gentlemen?"

Reybold, who had slipped around by the little cripple and was holding
him in a caressing way from behind, looked over to Beau and was even
more impressed with that generally undaunted worthy's expression. It
was that of acute and suffering sensibility, perhaps the effervescence
of some little remaining pride, or it might have been a twinge of the
gout. Beau looked at the little boy, suspended there with the weak
back and the narrow chest, and that scintillant, sincere spirit
beaming out with courage born in the stock he belonged to. Admiration,
conciliation, and pain were in the ruined vagrant's eyes. Reybold felt
a sense of pity. He put his hand in his pocket and drew forth a
dollar.

"Here, Beau," he said, "I'll make an exception. You seem to have some
feeling. Don't mind the boy!"

In an instant the coin was flying from his hand through the air. The
beggar, with a livid face and clinched cane, confronted the
Congressman like a maniac.

"You bilk!" he cried. "You supper customer! I'll brain you! I had
rather parted with my shoes at a dolly shop and gone gadding the hoof,
without a doss to sleep on--a town pauper, done on the vag--than to
have made been scurvy in the sight of that child and deserve his words
of shame!"