_"Dere smoke"_ (it ran--or something like that--I read it), "I hate tu tell ya for I dident think it was annything but I got the old Con too an im awful sick and duno whatin bleazes im gone do, say is there anny chanst up there where yu ar, but don you worry bout me. _Jimmy._"
It was a terrible blow to Smokey, but right away the optimism that seems to breed itself in these woods bolstered him to action. He promptly sent a picture-postcard, and on it he wrote:
"yu se the injiner mr. Milcay, an come on up its fine an I got a swel plaze to liv and lots ov work, no selin jist deliverin. _Smokey._"
But that was only the beginning of Smokey's discharge of obligation. He interviewed the Pullman conductor. The conductor passed the word to Mulcahy at Utica, and two days later the porter brought back word to the tense, waiting little figure at the Saranac Lake station that it was all fixed and Jimmy was coming on by next night's train.
All that evening and all next day Smokey was mighty busy. He bolted the delivery of the New York papers, but at every house he stopped long enough to gasp:
"Please lady, has you-all got any ole pitcher supplements?"
In the evening he had a pile of them. He had begged leave of Mat Munn, the grocer, to extract nails from discarded boxes. With these, and a brick for a hammer, he covered the sloping roof walls of the garret mansion with stage beauties, art supplements, Buster Browns, Happy Hooligans, baseball giants and magazine covers. This art paneling covered every draughty hole or crack. Flour sacks draped Jimmy's sofa-couch. All that last night, while the Montreal Express brought Jimmy into the hills, there sounded the persistent tap-tapping of Smokey's brick hammer.
But in the morning when Jimmy, pale and sickly, climbed down from the baggage-car, there was no Smokey to meet or greet him. Jimmy wandered around, weakness of body conspiring with disappointment to sap his courage. He had no idea where Smokey lived and, being a New Yorker with a metropolitan turn of thought, in that circumstance he felt himself and Smokey completely lost to each other.
Presently, as Jimmy sat disconsolate on a baggage truck, an individual in shirt sleeves and savoring of paint halted before him. After a moment's study he said: