"My chap was a marble cutter from Carrara."
Tito banged the door of the furnace. "_I_ too am from Carrara."
"Good!" cried Fairfax, "good enough." And to himself he said: "I'll be darned if I ever knew Benvenuto Cellini's real name!"
"Carrara," continued his companion, "is small. He may have been a cousin. What was his name?"
"Benvenuto Cellini," replied Tony, easily, and rang his bell.
Once more they rolled out into the night. As they drove through the country Fairfax saw the early moonlight lie along the tracks, sifting from the heavens like a luminous snow. No breeze stirred and over the grain fields the atmosphere hung hot and heavy, and they rushed through a sea of heat and wheat and harvest smells. The wind of their going made a stir, and as Fairfax peered out from his window his head was blown upon by the wind of the speed.
Falutini from his side of the cab said, "Benvenuto Cellini. That is not a Carrara man, no, no."
"I never knew him by any other name," said the engineer. "I like Italians." He threw this cheerfully over his shoulder at his inferior.
There was a childlike and confiding smile on the Italian's face; brutal as all Italian peasants are, brutal but kindly and unsuspicious as a child, ready to love and ready to hate.
"Only you mustn't use your knife; it's not well thought of in America. You'll get sent to gaol."
The Limited whistled from around a curve, came roaring toward them, tore past them, cutting the air, and Fairfax's local plugged along when the mile-a-minute left them. Tony was conscious that as he hummed the sound grew full and louder; he was accompanied by a voice more assured than his own, and in melodious fraternity the two men sang together. So they took their train in.
The Kennys did not know what had happened to Misther Fairfax. He sang on the stairs now and again as he had done when he first came to Nut Street. He bought the children sweet Jackson balls and the baby nearly died from "wan in its troat," and his mother picked him up by his socks and rattled the sticky sweet out of the child's larynx, and the cat finished it.
Tony's foreman was asked in to have supper and a late cup of coffee, and Miss Cora Kenny, whom "Pop" had sent to the Troy convent the first week of Antony's appearance in the Gents' Boarding and Lodging House, came home for a Catholic holiday, and she helped her mother. They made macaroni for Tito Falutini--"high Falutini," as Mrs. Kenny called him. The name stuck, and the macaroni stuck as well, fast to the plate; but the Italian, in bashful gratitude, his eyes suffused with smoke and tears, ate gratefully, gesticulating his satisfaction, and Cora Kenny studied him from the stove where she slaved to tempt the appetites of Fairfax and his friend.