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Now, you fetch that melon out in the garden, by the cucumber vines, and I will show you the conditions that should surround a melon barbecue," and the old man led the way to the garden, followed by the boys, and he got them seated around in the dirt, with the growing corn on one side, a patch of sunflowers on another, a crabapple tree on one side, giving a little shade where they sat, and the alley fence on the other.

It was arranged that half of the force should proceed at top speed to Crabapple post office and mobilize there; that Halloway himself should push through to Viper and eavesdrop on the telegraph key, and that the others should loaf about Coal City watching the suspects and gleaning what information they could.

The white glory of the plum thickets at its height and the hawthornes, whose young leaves have been a picture of pink and red, will soon break into blossom and vie with the crabapple thickets in calling attention to the beauty of masses of color when arranged by the Master Painter. The carpet of the woodlands grows softer and thicker, and more varied each day. Ferns and brakes are coming thickly.

The electric light was on, as it generally was by day, and under it stood as formidable a figure as ever I encountered in my life of crime. Imagine a thin but extremely wiry man, past middle age, brown and bloodless as any crabapple, but as coolly truculent and as casually alert as Raffles at his worst. It was, it could only be, the fire-eating and prison-inspecting colonel himself!

One night Allen slept in Beaulings; the next he was home, rising at four o'clock in order to take his stage out of Crabapple at seven sharp. It was a splendid job, and brought them thirty-five dollars a month; not in mere trade at the store, but actual money.

For illustration: Cultivation may develop a perfect specimen of a crabapple, but no amount of careful training could change the crabapple into a Johnathan. Likewise, no system of education can hope to change a numskull into a Newton, or to produce a Solomon from a Simple Simon.

His eyes, as tenderly blue as flowers, gazed at her with a faint masking of humor. "This is worse'n usual," she said sharply. "And I ain't going to have you fill yourself with any more of that patent trash. You don't spare me by not letting on. I can tell as soon as you're miserable. David can fetch the doctor from Crabapple to-night if you don't look better." "But I am," he assured her.

With ineffaceable gloom they ate chicken, both white meat and dark, drumsticks, wishbones, and livers; they ate corn-on-the-cob, many ears, and fried potatoes and green peas and string-beans; they ate peach preserves and apricot preserves and preserved pears; they ate biscuits with grape jelly and biscuits with crabapple jelly; they ate apple sauce and apple butter and apple pie.

Allen, he knew, intended in the fall to give up the stage for the infinitely wider world of freight cars; and David wondered whether Priest, the storekeeper in Crabapple who had charge of the awarding of the position, could be brought to see that he was as able a driver, almost, as Allen. It was probable Priest would call him too young for the charge of the Government mail.

An alfalfa sent us from Washington did well, and potatoes also gave a fair return, though our summer frosts often destroyed whole patches of the latter. Our imported plum and crabapple trees were ringed by mice beneath the snow in winter.