“Jolly kid!” he said, swinging his string of fish toward the baby who abandoned Archibald’s finger to clutch at the slippery prize. “I’ll fix the trout for you, Peg.”
Archibald straightened up and looked at the boy admiringly. Nothing disturbed Jimmy’s cheerful nonchalance—but then Jimmy had not a strange baby deposited, without warning, in his family circle. He would eat his breakfast and go home, but the baby, apparently, was to stay at the shack.
“What did you call him, Peg?” the alleged Head of the Family asked feebly.
“Well, his name’s Bruce,—after the spider man, you know. The McKenzies are Scotch. But they call him ‘Boots.’ Baby talk’s silly but I do think Boots is a nice funny little name, don’t you?”
She went back to the kitchen with Jimmy, and Archibald followed, with a backward glance at the baby who resigned himself philosophically to the desertion and settled back among the pillows with the evident intention of going to sleep at once.
“Good old Boots!” murmured the man to whom philosophy had always come hard.
As he washed his hands at the kitchen pump, he eyed his forefinger with a whimsical smile. Queer little thing, a baby’s hand. He could imagine that if the baby happened to be a man’s own—after all, perhaps even neighboring wasn’t the last word. Human brotherhood was a big thing, but a man’s own—
“D’ you like them fried in corn meal, Mr. Archibald?” called Pegeen.
He said that he did.