But there was no smile on Old Hundred's face. Here and there, rising
behind the little stores and lunch rooms, we could detect the tops of
the old houses, pushed back by commerce. But most of the houses had
disappeared altogether. Only the old white meeting-house at the head
of the common looked down benignly, unchanged.
"The trail of the trolley is over it all!" Old Hundred murmured, as we
hastened northward, out of the village.
After we had walked some distance, Old Hundred said, "It ought to be
around here somewhere, to the right of the road. I can't make anything
out, for these new houses."
"There was a lane down to it," said I, "and woods beyond."
"Sure," he cried, "Kingman's woods; and it was called Kingman's
field."
I sighted the ruins of a lane, between two houses. "Come on down to
Kingman's, fellers," I shouted, "an' choose up sides!"
Old Hundred followed my lead. We were in the middle of a potato patch,
in somebody's back yard. It was very small.
"This ain't Kingman's," wailed Old Hundred, lapsing into bad grammar
in his grief. "Why, it took an awful paste to land a home run over
right field into the woods! And there ain't no woods!"
There weren't. Nevertheless, this was Kingman's field. "See," said I,
trying to be cheerful, "here's where home was." And I rooted up a
potato sprout viciously. "You and Bill Nichols always chose up. You
each put a hand round a bat, alternating up the stick, for the first
choice. The one who could get his hand over the top enough to swing
the bat round his head three times, won, and chose Goodknocker Pratt.
First was over there where the wall isn't any more."
"Remember the time we couldn't find my 'Junior League'," said Old
Hundred, "and Goodknocker dreamed it was in a tree, and the next day
we looked in the trees, and there it was? I wonder what ever became of
old Goodknocker?"
He moved toward first base. The woods had been ruthlessly cut down,
and the wall dragged away in the process. We climbed a knoll, through
the stumps and dead stuff. At the top was a snake bush.
"Here's something, anyhow," said Old Hundred. "You were Uncas and I
was Hawk Eye, and we defended this snake bush from Bill's crowd of
Iroquois. We made shields out of barrel heads, and spears out of young
pine-tree tops. Wow, how they hurt!"
"About half a mile over is the swamp where the traps were," said I.
"Let's go. Maybe there's something in one of 'em."
"Then times would be changed," said he, smiling a little.
We walked a few hundred feet, and there was the swamp, quite dried up
without the protection of the woods, a tangle of dead stuff, and in
plain view of half a dozen houses. "Why" cried Old Hundred, "it was
miles away from _anything_!"
I looked at him, a woeful figure, clad in immaculate clothes, with
gray gloves, a cane in his hand. "You ought to be wearing red
mittens," said I, "and carrying that old shot-gun, with the ramrod
bent."
"The ramrod was always bent," said he. "It kept getting caught in
twigs, or falling out. Gee, how she kicked! Remember the day I got the
rabbit down there on the edge of the swamp? It made the snow all red,
poor little thing. I guess I wasn't so pleased as I expected to be."
"I remember the day you didn't get the wood pussy--soon enough," I
answered.
Just then a whistle shrieked. "Good Lord," said Old Hundred, "there's
one of those infernal trolleys! It must go right up the turnpike, past
Sandy."
"Let's take it!" I cried.
He looked at me savagely. "We'll walk!" he said.
"But it's miles and miles," I remonstrated.
"Nevertheless," said he, "we'll walk."
It was difficult to find the short cut in this tangle of slaughtered
forest, but we got back to the road finally, coming out by the
school-house. At least, we came out by a little shallow hole in the
ground, half filled with poison-ivy and fire-weed, and ringed by a few
stones. We paused sadly by the ruins.
"I suppose the trolly takes the kids into the village now," said I.
"Centralization, you know."
"There used to be a great stove in one corner, and the pipe went all
across the room," Old Hundred was saying, as if to himself. "If you
sat near it, you baked; if you didn't, you froze. Do you remember Miss
Campbell? What was it we used to sing about her? Oh, yes--
Three little mice ran up the stairs
To hear Biddy Campbell say her prayers;
And when they heard her say Amen,
The three little mice ran down again.
And, gee but you were the punk speller! Remember how there was always
a spelling match Friday afternoons? I'll never forget the day you fell
down on 'nausea.' You'd lasted pretty well that day, for you;
everybody'd gone down but you and Myrtie Swett and me and one or two
more. But when Biddy Campbell put that word up to you, you looked it,
if you couldn't spell it!"
"Hum," said I, "I wouldn't rub it in, if I were you. I seem to recall
a public day when old Gilman Temple, the committee man, asked you what
was the largest bird that flies, and you said, 'The Kangaroo.'"
Old Hundred grinned. "That's the day the new boy laughed," said he.
"Remember the new boy? I mean the one that wore the derby which we
used to push down over his eyes? Sometimes in the yard one of us would
squat behind him, and then somebody else would push him over
backward. We made him walk Spanish, too. But after that public day he
and I went way down to the horse-sheds behind the meeting-house in the
village, and had it out. I wonder why we always fought in the holy
horse-sheds? The ones behind the town hall were never used for that
purpose."
This was true, but I couldn't explain it. "We couldn't always wait to
get to the horse-sheds, as I remember it," said I. "Sometimes we
couldn't wait to get out of sight of school."
I began hunting the neighborhood for the hide-and-seek spots. The barn
and the carriage-shed across the road were still there, with cracks
yawning between the mouse-gray boards. The shed was also ideal for
"Anthony over." And in the pasture behind the school stood the great
boulder, by the sassafras tree. "I'll bet you can't count out," said
I.
"Pooh!" said Old Hundred. He raised his finger, pointed it at an
imaginary line of boys and girls, and chanted--
"Acker, backer, soda cracker,
Acker, backer, boo!
If yer father chews terbacker,
Out goes you.
And now you're it," he finished pointing at me.
I was not to be outdone. "Ten, twenty, thirty, forty,--" I began to
mumble. Then, "One thousand!" I shouted.
"Bushel o' wheat and a bushel o' rye,
All 't 'aint hid, holler knee high!"
I looked for a stick, stood it on end, and let it fall. It fell toward
the boulder. "You're up in the sassafras tree," I said.
"No," said Old Hundred, "that's Benny."
Then we looked at each other and laughed.
"You poor old idiot," said Old Hundred.
"You doddering imbecile," said I, "come on up to Sandy."
Somehow, it wasn't far to Sandy. It used to be miles. We passed by
Myrtie Swett's house on the way. It stood back from the turnpike just
as ever, with its ample doorway, its great shadowing elms, its air of
haughty well-being. Myrtie, besides a prize speller, was something of
a social queen. She was very beautiful and she affected ennui.
"Oh, dear, bread and beer,
If I was home I shouldn't be here!"
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."