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Updated: June 17, 2025
It is not nearly so easy to take a practical joke as to perpetrate one. Evelyn was sitting thoughtfully on the porch when her father and mother returned. Mrs. Ellsworth was sitting at the center window above, placidly looking out. Her eyes swept carelessly over the Van Kamps, and unconcernedly passed on to the rest of the landscape. Mrs. Van Kamp gasped and clutched the arm of her husband.
Then, indolently, negligently, gracefully, he had strolled out of the house, down the steps, into the hot and dusty street and so on and on and out of their lives. Stella Kamps had never seen him again. Her letters back home to her folks in Kansas were triumphs of bravery and bare-faced lying. The kind of bravery, and the kind of lying that only a woman could understand.
The first faltering steps in the social career of Gunner Moran and Tyler Kamps had begun. To an onlooker, it might have been mirth-provoking if it hadn't been, somehow, tear-compelling. The thing that little Miss Hall was doing might have seemed trivial to one who did not know that it was magnificent. It wasn't dancing merely that she was teaching these awkward, serious, frightened boys.
Tyler Kamps was as tired as only a boy can be at 9.30 P.M. who has risen at 5.30 A.M. Yet he lay wide awake in his hammock eight feet above the ground, like a giant silk-worm in an incredible cocoon and listened to the sleep-sounds that came from the depths of two hundred similar cocoons suspended at regular intervals down the long dark room.
Stella Kamps had been a Kansas school teacher in the days before she met and married Clint Kamps. And she had never quite got over it. Things like "Tom Brown At Rugby" and "Hans Brinker, Or the Silver Skates." He had read them, dutifully, but they were as good as new. No thumbed pages, no ragged edges, no creases and tatters where eager boy hands had turned a page over hastily.
From his hammock came the deep, regular inhalation, exhalation, with an occasional grunt or sigh. The normal sleep-sounds of a very tired boy. The trouble with Tyler Kamps was that he missed two things he hadn't expected to miss at all. And he missed not at all the things he had been prepared to miss most hideously. First of all, he had expected to miss his mother.
Van Kamp, "but this water belongs to us. My daughter bought it, all that is in the ground, above the ground, or that may fall from the sky upon these premises." The mutual siege lasted until after seven o'clock, but it was rather one-sided. The Van Kamps could drink all the water they liked, it made them no hungrier.
A ludicrous look of surprise on Slovatsky's face before he crumpled and crashed. This man it was who had Tyler Kamps' admiration. It was more than admiration. It was nearer adoration. But there was nothing unnatural or unwholesome about the boy's worship of this man.
When he had finished it the planing, the staining, the polishing Chippendale himself, after he had designed and executed his first gracious, wide-seated, back-fitting chair, could have felt no finer creative glow. As for the books it held, just to run your eye over them was like watching Tyler Kamps grow up.
In the hard years that followed years in which the blood-thirsty and piratical games of his boyhood paled to the mildest of imaginings the nickname still clung, long after he had ceased to resent it; long after he had stripes and braid to refute it. But in that Tyler Kamps we are not interested. It is the boy Tyler Kamps with whom we have to do. Bewildered, lonely, and a little resentful.
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