We went out on the sand, Mark first, the wild man second, and me last. Out there he could stand up straight, and I tell you when he did I was glad he was so simple and good-natured, and not wild and savage like the pictures in front of the side-show. I’m pretty well grown for my age, but I couldn’t have reached to the top of his head even standing tiptoe. My father is six foot one, so I’m used to seeing a big man, but our wild man must have been a head taller than dad. Afterward we got him to let us measure him, and he turned out to be six foot six and a half—almost tall enough to be a giant in a museum. And he was broad, too. When he turned his back it looked as wide as a dining-room table.
His face was round and innocent, like I said before, and good-natured. His hair was black as Mr. Whittaker’s stallion and as coarse as the horse’s tail—coarse and straight. Take it and his smooth, coppery skin, and we made sure he was an Indian. He was, almost.
He was all ragged, with great holes torn in his clothes. I looked at his feet. One of them had a shoe on, and the other was bare. The bare one was the foot that had scared us so when we saw its print in the sand by the cave with the toes pointing sideways. Now we understood, for that foot was twisted and sort of crumpled up like it had been hurt a long time ago and healed wrong. But with all that he hardly limped a bit, and how he could run!
“Don’t send Sammy back,” he begged. “Sammy wants to stay here. Don’t tell on Sammy.”
“Back where?” asks Mark.
“Back to the big farm. Sammy ran away.... They make Sammy sleep in the house, and they make him dig and work, and they won’t ever let him go fishing. Don’t send Sammy back.”
“He means the poor-farm, I guess,” I said to Mark; and he nodded.
“How did you get sent to the poor-farm?”
Sammy always spoke about himself as if he were somebody else. I never heard him say “I” as long as I have known him. It made him seem very simple and childish and feeble-minded, but Sammy knew and thought a whole lot more than folks gave him credit for. He knew how many apples it took to make six, all right, and lots of things besides. But, after all, he was just like a little boy, a little frightened boy with a great big body.
He told us all about himself, and it was so interesting to listen to that we clean forgot all about Plunk and Binney and dinner until he was through. He said he was born in a lumber camp that used to be in the neighborhood a good many years ago, before the pine was cut off. His father was half French and half Indian, and his mother was mostly Indian. He couldn’t remember much about being little, because he wasn’t very old when he got hurt some way with a falling tree or a log on a rollway or something, and it almost killed him. That’s how he got his twisted foot, and probably he got a knock on the head that spoiled his brains.