He called out, “Hello, youngsters!” as quietly as though he had seen us all the day before. I said “Peter!” in a strangled sort of whisper, and wondered what made my knees wabble as I stood staring at him as though he had been a ghost.
But Peter was no ghost. He was there before me, in the body, still smoking his foolish little pipe, wearing the familiar old coonskin cap and coat that looked as though the moths had made many a Roman holiday of their generously deforested pelt. He took the pipe out of his mouth as he stepped over to me, and pulled off his heavy old gauntlet before he shook hands.
“Peter!” I repeated in my ridiculous small whisper.
He didn’t speak. But he smiled, a bit wistfully, as he stared down at me. And for just a moment, I think, an odd look of longing came into his searching honest eyes which studied my face as though he were counting every freckle and line and eyelash there. He continued to X-ray me with that hungry stare of his until I took my hand away and could feel the blood surging back to my face.
“It’s a long time,” he said as he puffed hard on his pipe, apparently to keep it from going out. The 269 sound of his voice sent a little thrill through my body. I felt as rattle-headed as a rabbit, and was glad when Dinkie and Poppsy captured him by each knee and hung on like catamounts.
“Where did you come from?” I finally asked, trying in vain to be as collected as Peter himself.
Then he told me. He told me as nonchalantly as though he were giving me a piece of news of no particular interest. He had rather a difficult book to finish up, and he concluded the quietness of Alabama Ranch would suit him to a T. And when spring came he wanted to have a look about for a nest of the whooping crane. It has been rather a rarity, for some sixteen or seventeen years, this whooping crane, and the American Museum was offering a mighty handsome prize for a specimen. Then he was compelled to give his attention to Dinkie and Poppsy, and tried the slide a couple of times, and announced that our coaster was better than the chariot of Icarius. And by this time I had recovered my wits and my composure and got some of the snow off my Mackinaw.
“Have I changed?” I asked Peter as he turned to study my face for the second time.
“To me,” he said as he brushed the snow from his gauntlets, “you are always adorable!” 270
“Verboten!” I retorted to that, wondering why anything so foolish could have the power to make my pulses sing.