“You have now, old chap. How’s it seem?”
“Fine, only—I’m wondering if—if I’m all right. You don’t suppose I got hit on the head or—or anything like that, do you, sir?”
“Great Scott, no! You just slept because you were tired out and were in a new place and, if I do say it, had a good bed. Now, how’s the knee this morning?”
Mr. York himself attended to putting on new bandages, in spite of Sam’s expostulations, and brought him water in a bowl and soap and a face-cloth and found his tooth-brush for him and generally valeted him. Sam was all for doing things for himself, even for being allowed to get up and have his breakfast downstairs, but when, at Mr. York’s request, he gently bent that right knee, he concluded that he was not, after all, quite ready to assert his independence. The thing was as stiff and lame as could be.
“Thought so,” said the other. “You keep it quiet to-day, Craig. To-night we’ll get at it with liniment and to-morrow you’ll be up and around again, I guess. After breakfast we’ll get you down on the veranda. There you are, now. How’s your appetite?”
Sam smiled. “I could eat a hedgehog, quills and all,” he answered.
“Sorry we haven’t hedgehog this morning,” laughed Mr. York. “I’m afraid it’s only the usual ham and eggs and trimmings. But I’ll see that you get enough of that.”
An hour afterwards, attired in a dressing-gown of his host’s, Sam was lying at length in a long wicker chair, propped up with many red cushions, on the broad veranda. Although considerably lower than the neighbouring camp, “Greysides,” as Mr. York called his place, was still pretty well up in the world, and from the veranda one could look over rolling hills and see, on fair days, the distant blue of Lake Erie. The house was large, or seemed so to Sam, and was of field stone and grey weathered shingle, with numerous wide stone chimneys and many squatty gable-ends. The veranda that skirted three sides of the house was as wide as a room, and from it, between stone pillars, one saw on each side miles of rolling hills, wooded or meadowed. A path turned and twisted down a little slope from the broad steps to a break in the stone wall that lined the road. There there was a roughly-made trellis-arch of unbarked logs on which a rose vine was showing a few late blossoms. Behind the house the ground sloped upward again, and the trees, well thinned out in front, closed their ranks. Sam thought the place wonderful and perfect, inside and out, and all during that first forenoon was sorely tempted to pinch himself to make sure that he was really there.
Presently Mr. York joined his guest, pulling a chair near to Sam’s and chatting as he opened his morning’s mail. Sam accepted a day-old newspaper and idly glanced over the first page of it, but somehow newspapers seemed of little interest up here away from the world, and he soon let it drop and returned to his contented and dreamy contemplation of the distant hills. After a while Mr. York tossed aside his letters and papers and leaned back in his chair. Then they talked. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Sam talked, for Mr. York wanted to know many things and Sam was soon telling all about himself and about Amesville and the high school nine, with Mr. York only contributing an occasional encouraging word or a question. Normally Sam wasn’t very much of a talker, and he didn’t remember ever having said so much at once or told so many intimate facts about himself before. Afterwards he was surprised and a little embarrassed when he recalled his loquacity.
But it wasn’t altogether one-sided, for Sam learned somewhat of his host that morning, and more subsequently. Mr. York—John Orville York, in full—was an architect by profession and lived in Cleveland. He was alone in the world save for a sister whom he called Topsy—Sam didn’t learn her real name. Topsy, Mr. York explained, was just now away on a visit to friends in the East and he was keeping bachelor’s hall. He had been at “Greysides” since the middle of July, with an occasional visit to the city, and his vacation would be at an end in another ten days. Although he did not say so, his visitor concluded that he was wealthy; everything at “Greysides” indicated it. He had graduated from Warner College, where he had played three years on the baseball team, and had afterwards studied his profession in Chicago. He confessed to two passions. One, he said, was baseball, and the other chess. Did Craig play chess? No? Well, he ought to learn it. It was the finest thing in the world. After dinner they’d get the board out and have a lesson, by Jove!