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Wessner and Black Jack crowded to the very edge of the swamp a little above the wire, and crouched, waiting. They heard Freckles before they saw him. He came gliding down the line swiftly, and as he rode he was singing softly: "Oh, do you love, Oh, say you love " He got no farther. The sharply driven wheel struck the tense wire and bounded back.
You see, the Boss might come riding down this trail any minute, and the little mare's so wheedlesome that if she'd come on to you in your prisint state all of a sudden, she'd stop that short she'd send Mr. McLean out over the ears of her. No disparagement intinded to the sinse of the mare!" he added hastily. Wessner belched a fearful oath, while Freckles laughed merrily.
His left arm, with the hand battered almost out of shape, stretched beside him, and the right, with no hand at all, lay across a chest that was a mass of purple welts. McLean's mind traveled to the night, almost a year before, when he had engaged Freckles, a stranger. The Boss bent, covering the hurt arm with one hand and laying the other with a caress on the boy's forehead.
"Will it fall?" whispered the lobbyist. "I I think so!" blubbered Freckles. The central portion of the State-house was very high. Above that part of the building which was in use there was a long stretch leading to the tower. The shaft had been built clear up, though practically unused.
Uncle Ike sat and smoked his pipe in silence for a few minutes, blew the smoke out in clouds, and looked at it as though searching for something, and there was a serious look on his face, as though he was trying to fathom some mystery, while the redheaded boy was looking at himself in a hand mirror to see if the freckles on his nose were any smaller since he had been using some of his mother's toilet powder to remove them.
There was a time when you and he walked together, your arms upon each other's shoulders. But this is some other one than he. The boy you knew had freckles, and could spit between his teeth, ever and ever so far. They don't have the same things to eat they used to have, or, if they do, it all tastes different.
Bobby was becoming enthusiastic. He tugged and tugged. Sometimes when he did not let go the rope in time, he was lifted slightly off his feet. The sun was hot, but he had no thought of quitting. His hat fell off backward, his towsled hair wetted at the edges, clung to his forehead, his dull red cheeks grew redder behind their freckles, his eyes fairly closed in an ecstasy of enjoyment.
"Was that in a Bost'n horsepittle?" he asked, with eager interest. "That's where. In the fall three years ago. Pneumony." "Mine was rheumatic fever two years ago," said the Cap'n. "It's what drove me off'm deep water. She was fat, wasn't she, and had light hair and freckles across the bridge of her nose, and used to set side of the bed and hum: 'I'm a pilgrim, faint and weary'?"
He had freckles, too, and he was so bashful that his voice blushed when he used it. He didn't have a word to say until dinner, when he said "thank you" to Sam, the waiter. Altogether he was so meek that he had us worried; but then, as Allie Bangs said, you can't always tell about these multimillionaires. Some of them didn't have the nerve of a mouse.
While Duncan ate, Freckles told him something about the evening, as well as he could find words to express himself, and the big man was so amazed he kept forgetting the treat in his hands. Then Freckles mounted his wheel and began a spin that terminated only when the biggest Plymouth Rock in Duncan's coop saluted a new day, and long lines of light reddened the east.
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