"You call off yo' hound," the newcomer said imperiously. "I don't let my dog fight with every cur he meets."
The small boy wheeled—hands in trouser pockets—and gazed with disappointed eyes to where the two canines were making friends.
"I wish they would jump on each other; I thest wish't they 106 would," he muttered. "I know Speaker could whip."
Grandfather Lance looked with interest at the child. Such a boy had he been. This was the spirit he had bequeathed to Lance's mother, and which she had wasted when she married a schoolteacher.
Melissa Cleaverage, come down in the world now, paid timid court to her father without much success; but in the middle of the afternoon, her four-year-old son settled the question of the visitor remaining for the night. Jesse Lance had been across the gulch to look at some wild land which belonged to him, up on the head waters of the creek called Lance's Laurel, a haggard, noble domain, its lawless acres still tossing an unbroken sea of green tree-tops towards the sky. As he returned to the Cleaverage place, he traversed a little woods-path without noticing the small jeans-clad boy who dragged a number of linked objects across the way.
"You gran'pap!" came the shrill challenge after him. "You quit a-breakin' up my train."
Jesse glanced toward the ground and saw a great oak chip dangling by a string against his boot. He turned an impassive countenance, and thrust with his foot to free it from its entanglement.
"Watch out—you'll break it!" cried the child, running up. Then, as a second jerk shook and rattled the dangling bit of wood, 107 "Ain't you got no sense?" he roared. "That's the injine to my train that you done stepped on and broke all up, and it cain't go a lick with you, big, lazy loafer, standin' right in the middle of it!"
For a moment the fierce baby eyes looked up into eyes as fierce above them. Such a glance should have sent any youngster weeping to its mother's skirts; but the tiny man on the woods-path stood his ground, ruffling like a game cock.
"Uh-huh!" jeered the grandfather, "and who might you be, young feller?"