"He acts sort of scared and sort of fierce, and just runs and hides from
people. Maybe if you'll tell me what you want done, I could do it."
"Maybe you could--and then again maybe you couldn't," returned the
other, with a great show of giving her proposition serious
consideration. "A good many folks think they can do just what I can--if
I'd only tell 'em how--and sometimes they find out they can't."
Upon the word, they topped a little rise, and Johnnie laid a swift,
detaining hand upon her companion's arm. At the roadside, in a little
open, grassy space where once evidently a cabin had stood, knelt the
figure of a gaunt old man. At first he seemed to the approaching pair to
be gesticulating and pointing, but a moment's observation gave them the
gleam of a knife in his hand--he was playing mumblety-peg. As they
stood, drawn back near some roadside bushes, watching him, the long,
lean old arm went up, the knife flashing against the knuckles of the
clenched fist and, with a whirl of the wrist, reversing swiftly in air,
to bury its blade in the soil before the player.
"Hi! Hi! Hi! I th'owed it. That counts two for me," the cracked old
falsetto shrilled out.
There on that grassy plot that might have been a familiar dooryard of
his early days, he was playing alone, gone back to childhood. Johnnie
gazed and her eyes swam with unshed tears.
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