Chapter 12

she used to say at parties, with a tired air that was the secret envy of the other little girls, who were unable to conceal their pleasure at being "here." However, Myrtie never went home, we noticed. Rather did she take a leading part in every game of Drop-the-handkerchief, Post Office, or Copenhagen--tinglingly thrilling games, with unknown possibilities of a sentimental nature.

"If I thought she still lived in the old place, I'd go up and tell her I had a letter for her," said Old Hundred.

"She'd probably give you a stamp," I replied.

"Not unless she's changed!" he grinned.

But we saw no signs of Myrtie. Several children played in the yard. There was the face of a strange woman at the window, a very plain woman, who looked old, as she peered keenly at the two urban passers.

"It _can't_ be Myrtie!" I heard Old Hundred mutter, as he hastened on.

Sandy was almost the most wonderful spot in the world. It was, as most swimming holes are, on the down-stream side of a bridge. The little river widened out, on its way through the meadows, here and there into swimming holes of greater or less desirability. There was Lob's Pond, by the mill, and Deep Pool, and Musk Rat, and Little Sandy. But Sandy was the best of them all. It was shaded on one side by great trees, and the banks were hidden from the road by alder screens. At one end there was a shelving bottom, of clean sand, where the "little kids" who couldn't swim sported in safety. Under the opposite bank the water ran deep for diving. And in mid-stream the pool was so very deep that nobody had ever been able to find bottom there. In the other holes, you could hold your hands over your head and go down till your feet touched, without wetting your fingers. But not the longest fish-line had ever been long enough to plumb Sandy's depths. Indeed, it was popularly believed that there was _no_ bottom in Sandy, and a mythical horn pout, of gigantic proportions, was supposed to inhabit its dark, watery abysses.

Old Hundred and I stood on the bridge and looked down on a little pool. "I could jump across it now," he sighed. "But I wish it were a warmer day. I'd go in, just the same."

There was a honk up the road, and a touring car jolted over the boards behind us, with a load of veils and goggles. The dust sifted through the bridge, and we heard it patter on the water below.

"I fancy there's more travel now," said I. "And the alder screen seems to be gone. Perhaps we'd better not go in."

Old Hundred leaned pensively over the white rail--the sign of a State highway; for the dusty old Turnpike was now converted into a gray strip of macadam road, torn by the automobiles, with a trolley track at one side.

"There's a lucky bug on the water," he said presently. "If we were in now, we might catch him, and make our fortunes."

"And get our clothes tied up," said I.

"As I recall it, you were the prize beef chawer," he remarked. "I never could see why you didn't go into vaudeville, in a Houdini act. I used to soak the knots in your shirt and dry 'em, and soak 'em again; but you always untied 'em, often without using your teeth, either."

"You couldn't, though," I grinned.

"Charlo beef, The beef was tough, Poor Old Hundred Couldn't get enough!

"How many times have you gone home barefoot, with your stockings and your undershirt, in a wet knot, tied to your fish-pole?"

"Not many," said he.

"What?" said I.

"It wasn't often that I wore stockings and an undershirt in swimming season," he answered. "Don't you remember being made to soak your feet in a tub on the back porch before going to bed, and going fast asleep in the process?"

"If you put a horse hair in water, it will turn to a snake," I replied, irrelevantly.

"Anybody knows that," said Old Hundred. "If you toss a fish back in the water before you're done fishing, you won't get any more bites, because he'll go tell all the other fish. Bet yer I can swim farther under the water 'n you can. Come on, it isn't very cold."

I looked hesitantly at the pool.

"Stump yer!" he taunted.

I started for the bank. But just then the trolley wire, which we had quite forgotten, began to buzz. We paused. Up the pike came the car. It stopped just short of the bridge, by a cross-road, and an old man alighted. Then it moved on, shaking more dust down upon the brown water. The old man regarded us a moment, and instead of turning up the cross-road, came over to us.

("Know him?" I whispered.)

("Is it Hen Flint, that used to drive the meat wagon with the white top?" said Old Hundred. "Lord, is it so many years ago!")

"How are you, Mr. Flint?" said I.

"Thot I didn't mistake ye," said the old man, putting out a large, thin, but powerful hand. "Whar be ye now, Noo York? Come back to look over the old place, eh? I reckon ye find it some changed. Don't know it myself, hardly. You look like yer ma; sorter got her peak face."

"Where's the swimming hole now?" asked Old Hundred.

"I don't calc'late thar be any," said the old man. "The gol durn trolley an' the automobiles spiled the pool here, an' the mill-pond's no good since they tore down the mill, an' bust the dam. Maybe the little fellers git their toes wet down back o' Bill Flint's; I see 'em splashin' round thar hot days. But the old fellers have to wash in the kitchen, same's in winter."

"But the boys must swim somewhere," said I.

"I presume likely they go to the beaches," said Henry Flint. "I see 'em ridin' off in the trolley."

"Yes," said I, "it must be easy to get anywhere now, with the trolleys so thick."

"It's too durn easy," he commented. "Thar hain't a place ye can't git to, though why ye should want to git thar beats me. Mostly puts high-flown notions in the women-folks' heads, and vegetable gardens on 'em."

He shook hands again, lingeringly. "Yer father wus a fine man," he said to Old Hundred--"a fine man. I sold yer ma meat before you wus born."

Then he moved rather feebly away, down the cross-road. Presently a return trolley approached.

"Curse the trolleys!" exclaimed Old Hundred. "They go everywhere and carry everybody. They spoil the country roads and ruin the country houses and villages. Where they go, cheap loafing places, called waiting-rooms, spring up, haunted by flies, rotten bananas and village muckers. They trail peanut shells, dust and vulgarity; and they make all the country-side a back yard of the city. Let's take this one."

We passed once more the hole where the school had been, and drew near a cross-road. I looked at Old Hundred, he at me. He nodded, and we signalled the conductor. The car stopped. We alighted and turned silently west, pursued by peering eyes. After a few hundred feet the cross-road went up a rise and round a bend, and the new frame houses along the Turnpike were shut from view. Over the brambled wall we saw cows lying down in a pasture.

"It's going to rain," said I.

"No," said Old Hundred, "that's only a sign when they lie down first thing in the morning."

Then we were silent once more. Into the west the land, the rocky, rolling, stubborn, beautiful New England country-side, lay familiar--how familiar!--to our eyes. To the left, back among the oaks and hickories, stood a solid, simple house, painted yellow with green blinds. To the right almost opposite was a smaller house of white, with an orchard straggling up to the back door. And in one of them I was born, and in the other Old Hundred. Down the road was another house, a deep red, half hidden in the trees. Smoke was rising from the chimney now, and drifting rosily against the first flush of sunset.

"Betsy's getting Cap'n Charles's supper," said Old Hundred.

"Then Betsy's about one hundred and six," said I, "and the Cap'n one hundred and ten. Oh, John, it was a long, long time ago!"

"It doesn't seem so," he answered. "It seems only yesterday that we met up there in your grove on Hallow-e'en to light our jack-lanterns, and crept down the road in the cold white moonlight to poke them up at Betsy's window. Remember when she caught us with the pail of water?"

"I remember," said I, "the time you put a tack in the seat of Cap'n Charles's stool, in his little shoemaker's shop out behind the house, and he gave you five cents, to return good for evil; so the next day you did it again, in the hope of a quarter, but he decided there were times when the Golden Rule is best honored in the breach, and gave you a walloping."

"It was some walloping, too," said Old Hundred, with a reminiscent grin. "It would be a good time now," he added, "to swipe melons, if Betsy's getting supper. Though I believe she had all those melon stems connected with an automatic burglar-alarm in the kitchen. She ought to have taken out a patent on that invention!"

He looked about him, first at his house, then at mine. "How small the orchard is now," he mused. "The trees are like little old women. And look at Crow's Nest--it used to be a hundred feet high."

The oak he pointed at still bore in its upper branches the remains of our tree-top retreat, a rotted beam or two straddling a crotch. "Peter Pan should rebuild it," said I. "I shall drop a line to Wendy. Do you still hesitate to turn over in bed?"

"Always," Old Hundred confessed. "I do turn over now, but it was years before I could bring myself to do it. I wonder where we got that superstition that it brought bad luck? If we woke in the night, up in Crow's Nest, and wanted to shift our positions, we got up and walked around the foot of the mattress, so we could lie on the other side without turning over. Remember?"

I nodded. Then the well-curb caught my eye. It was over the well we dug where old Solon Perkins told us to. Solon charged three dollars for the advice. He came with a forked elm twig, cut green, and holding the prongs tightly wrapped round his hands so that the base of the twig stuck out straight, walked back and fourth over the place, followed by my father and mother, and Old Hundred's father and mother, and Cap'n Charles and Betsy, and all the boys for a mile around, silently watching for the miracle. Finally the base of the twig bent sharply down. "Dig there," said Solon. He examined the twig to see if the bark was twisted. It was, so he added, "Bent hard. Won't have ter dig more'n ten foot." We dug twenty-six, but water came. And such water!

"I want some of that water," said I. "I don't want to go into the house; I don't even know who lives in it now. But I must have some of that water."

We went up to the well and lowered the bucket, which slid bounding down against the cool stones till it hit the depths with a dull splash. As we were drinking, an old man came peering out of the house. Old Hundred recognized him first.

"Well, Clarkie Poor, by all that's holy!" he cried. "We've come to get our hair cut."

Clarkson Poor blinked a bit before recognition came. "Yes," he said, "I bought the old place a couple o' year back, arter them city folks you sold it to got sick on it. Too fer off the trolley line for them. John's house over yon some noo comers 'a' got. They ain't changed it none. This is about the only part o' town that ain't changed, though. Most o' the old folks is gone, too, and the young uns, like you chaps, all git ambitious fer the cities. I give up cuttin' hair 'bout three year back--got kinder onsteady an' cut too many ears."

A sudden smile broke over Old Hundred's face. "Clarkie," he said, "you were always up on such things--is it rats or warts that you write a note to when you want 'em to go away?"

"Yes, it's rats, isn't it?" I cried, also reminded, for the first time, of our real quest.

"Why," said Clarkie, "you must be sure to make the note very partic'lar perlite, and tell 'em whar to go. Don't fergit that."

"Yes, yes," said we, "but is it warts or rats?"

"Well," said Clarkie, "it's both."

We looked one at the other, and grinned rather sheepishly.

"Only thar's a better way fer warts," Clarkie went on. "I knew a boy once who sold his. That's the best way. Yer don't have actually to sell 'em. Just git another feller to say, 'I'll give yer five cents fer yer warts,' and you say, 'All right, they're yourn,' and then they go. Fact."

We thanked him, and moved down to the road, declining his invitation to come into the house. Westward, the sun had gone down and left the sky a glowing amber and rose. The fields rolled their young green like a checkered carpet over the low hills--the sweet, familiar hills. For an instant, in the hush of gathering twilight, we stood there silent and bridged the years; wiping out the strife, the toil, the ambitions, we were boys again.

"Hark!" said Old Hundred, softly. Down through the orchard we heard the thin, sweet tinkle of a cow-bell. "There's a boy behind, with the peeled switch," he added, "looking dreamily up at the first star, and wishing on it--wishing for a lot of things he'll never get. But I'm sure he isn't barefoot. Let's go."

As we passed down the turnpike, between the rows of cheap frame houses, we saw, in the increasing dusk, the ruins of a lane, and the corner of a small, back-yard potato patch, that had been Kingman's field. We hastened through the noisy, treeless village, and boarded the Boston train, rather cross for want of supper.

"I wonder," said Old Hundred, as we moved out of the station, "whether we'd better go to Young's or the Parker House?"

_Mumblety-peg and Middle Age_

Old Hundred and I were taking our Saturday afternoon walk in the country--that is, in such suburbanized country as we could achieve in the neighborhood of New York. We had passed innumerable small boys and not a few small girls, but save for an occasional noisy group on a base-ball diamond none of them seemed to be playing any definite games.

"Did we use to wander aimlessly round that way?" asked Old Hundred.

"We did not," said I. "If it wasn't marbles in spring or tops in autumn it was duck-on-the-rock or stick-knife or----"

"Only we didn't call it stick-knife," said Old Hundred, "we called it mumblety-peg."

"We called it stick-knife," said I.

"Your memory is curiously bad," said Old Hundred. "You are always forgetting about these important matters. It was mumblety-peg."

"My memory bad!" I sniffed. "I suppose you think I've forgotten how I always licked you at stick-knife?"

Old Hundred grinned. Old Hundred's grin, to-day as much as thirty years ago, is a mask for some coming trouble. He always grinned before he sailed into the other fellow, which was an effective way to catch the other fellow off his guard. I presume he grins now before he cross-questions a witness. "I'll play you a game right now," he said softly.

"You're on," said I.

We selected a spot of clean, thin turf behind a roadside fence. It was in reality a part of somebody's yard, but it was the best we could do. I still carry a pocket-knife of generous proportions, to whittle with when we go for a walk, and this I produced and opened, handing it to Old Hundred. "Now begin," said I, as we squatted down.

He held the knife somewhat gingerly, first by the blade, then by the handle. "Wha--what do you do first?" he finally asked.

"Do?" said I. "Don't you remember?"

"No," he replied, "and neither do you."

"Give me the knife," I cried. I relied on the feel of it in my hand to awaken a dormant muscular memory to help me out. But no muscular memory was stirred. Old Hundred watched me with a smile. "Begin, begin!" he urged.

"Let's see," said I, "I think you took it first by the tip of the blade, this way, and made it stick up." I threw the knife. It stuck, but almost lay upon the ground.

"You've got to get two fingers under it," said Old Hundred. He tried, but there wasn't room. "You fail," he cried. "There's a point for me."

"Not till you've made it stick," said I.

We grew interested in our game. We threw the knife from our nose and chin, we dropped it from our forehead, we jumped it over our hand, we half-closed the blade and tossed it that way, and finally, when the talley was reckoned up in my favor, I began to look about for a stick to whittle into the peg.

Old Hundred rose and dusted his clothes. "Here," I cried. "You're not done yet!"

"Oh, yes I am!" he answered.

"Quitter, quitter, quitter!" I taunted.

"That may be," said he, "but a learned lawyer of forty-five with a dirty mug is rather more self-conscious than a boy of ten. I'll buy you a dinner when we get to town."

"Oh, very well," said I, peevishly, "but I didn't think you'd so degenerated. I'll let you off if you'll admit it was stick-knife."

"I'll admit it," said Old Hundred. "I suppose in a minute you'll ask me to admit that prisoners'-base was relievo."

"What _was_ relievo, by the way?" I asked.

"Relievo--relievo?" said Old Hundred. "Why that was a game we played mostly on the ice, up on Birch Meadow, don't you remember? When we got tired of hockey, we all put our coats and hockey sticks in a pile, one man was It, and the rest tried to skate from a distant line around the pile and back. It the chap who was It tagged anybody before he got around, that chap had to be It with him, and so on till everybody was caught. Then the first one tagged had to be It for a new start."

"I remember that game," said I. "I remember how Frank White, who could skate like a fiend, used to be the last one caught. Sometimes he'd get around a hundred boys, ducking and dodging and taking half a mile of ice to do it, but escaping untouched. Sometimes, if there weren't many playing, he'd go around backwards, just to taunt us. But I don't think that game was relievo. That doesn't sound like the name to me."

"What was it, then?" said Old Hundred.

"I don't know," I answered. "It's funny how you forget things."

By this time we were strolling along the road again. "Speaking of Birch Meadow," said Old Hundred, "what glorious skating we kids used to have there! I never go by Central Park in winter without pitying the poor New York youngsters, just hobbling round and round on a half-acre pond where the surface is cut up into powder an inch thick, and the crowd is so dense you can scarcely see the ice. Shall you ever forget that mile-long pond in the woods, not deep enough to drown in anywhere, and frozen over with smooth black ice as early as Thanksgiving Day? How we used to rush to it, up Love Lane, as soon as school was out!"

"Do you remember," said I, "how we passed it last year, and found the woods all cut and the water drained off?"

"Don't be a wet blanket," said Old Hundred, crossly. "The country has to grow."

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. The mood of memory was on him. I repented of my speech. "Yes," I answered. "No doubt the country has to grow. The colleges now play hockey on ponds made by the fire department. But there isn't that thrilling ring to your runners nor that long-drawn echo from the wooded shores when a crack crosses the ice."

"I can see it all this minute," said Old Hundred. "I can see my little self like a different person [which, indeed, he was!] as one of the crowd. We had chosen up sides--ten, twenty, thirty on a side. Stones, dragged from the shores, were put down for goals. Most of us had hockey sticks we had cut ourselves in the woods, hickory, with a bit of the curved root for the blade. You were one of the few boys who could afford a store stick. We had a hard rubber ball. Bobbie Pratt was always one goal because he had big feet. And over the black ice, against the sombre background of those cathedral aisles of white pine, we chased that ball, charging in solid ranks so that the ice sagged and protested under the rush of our runners, wheeling suddenly, darting in pursuit of one boy who had snaked the ball out from the maze of feet and was flying with it toward the goal, all rapid action, panting breath, superb life. It really must have been a beautiful sight, one of those hockey games. I can still hear the ring and roar of the runners as the crowd swept down in a charge!"

I smiled. "And I can still feel the ice when somebody's stick got caught between my legs. 'Hi, fellers, come look at the star Willie made!' I can hear you shouting, as you examined the spot where my anatomy had been violently super-imposed on the skating surface."

Old Hundred smiled too. "Fine little animals we were!" he said. "I suppose one reason why we don't see more games nowdays is because we live in the city. Even this suburbanized region is really city, dirtied all over with its spawn. Lord, Bill, think if we'd been cramped up in an East Side street, or reduced to Central Park for a skating pond! A precious lot of reminiscences we'd have to-day, wouldn't we? They build the kids what they call public play-grounds, and then they have to hire teachers to teach 'em how to play. Poor beggars, think of having to be taught by a grown-up how to play a game! They all have a rudimentary idea of base-ball; the American spirit and the sporting extras see to that. But I never see 'em playing anything else much, not even out here where the suburbs smut an otherwise attractive landscape."

"Perhaps," I ventured, "not only the lack of space and free open in the city has something to do with it, but the fact that the seasons there grow and change so unperceived. Games, you remember, go by a kind of immutable rotation--as much a law of childhood as gravitation of the universe. Marbles belong to spring, to the first weeks after the frost is out of the ground. They are a kind of celebration of the season, of the return to bare earth. Tops belong to autumn, hockey to the ice, base-ball to the spring and summer, foot-ball to the cold, snappy fall, and I seem to remember that even such games as hide-and-seek or puss-in-the-corner were played constantly at one period, not at all at another. If you played 'em out of time, they didn't seem right; there was no zest to them. Now, most of these game periods were determined long ago by physical conditions of ground and climate. They stem us back to nature. Cramp the youngsters in the artificial life of a city, and you snap this stem. My theory may be wild, all wrong. Yet I can't help feeling that our games, which we accepted and absorbed as a part of the universe, as much as our parents or the woods and fields, _were_ a part of that nature which surrounded us, linking us with the beginnings of the race. Most kids' games are centuries upon centuries old, they say. I can't help believing that for every sky-scraper we erect we end the life, for thousands of children, of one more game."

Old Hundred had listened attentively to my long discourse, nodding his head approvingly. "No doubt, no doubt," he said. "I shall hereafter regard the Metropolitan Tower as a memorial shaft, which ought to bear an inscription, 'Hic jacet, Puss-in-the-corner.' Yet I saw some poor little duffers on the East Side the other day trying to play soak with a tattered old ball, which kept getting lost under the push carts."

"They die hard," said I.

We had by this time come on our walk into a group of houses, the outskirts of a town. Several small boys were, apparently, aimlessly walking about.

"Why don't they _do_ something," Old Hundred exclaimed, half to himself. "Don't they know how, even out here?"

"Suppose you teach 'em," I suggested.

Again Old Hundred grinned. He walked over among the small boys, who stopped their talk and regarded him silently. "Ever play duck-on-the-rock?" he asked, with that curiously embarrassed friendliness of the middle-aged man trying to make up to boyhood. After a certain period, most of us unconsciously regard a small boy as a kind of buzz-saw, to be handled with extreme care.

The boys looked at one another, as if picking a spokesman. Finally one of them, a freckle-faced, stocky youngster who looked more like a country lad than the rest, replied. "They dunno how," he said. "They're afraid the stones'll hurt 'em. We used to play it up State all the time."

"There's your theory," said Old Hundred in an aside to me.