"Not according to your grandfather's thinking."
"What does he know about it? He's just an old fogy himself."
"We'll see, we'll see. If he wants to keep you tied to nurse's strings too long, we must play him a trick. Why, when I was fourteen I could shoot with any man about here—and drink with him, too, for that matter. Nobody kept me back, you see."
The boy looked up at Christopher with sparkling eyes, in which the eternal hero-worship of youth was already kindled.
"Oh, you're splendid!" he exclaimed, "and I'm going to be just like you. Grandpa shan't keep me a baby any longer, I can tell you. All this Greek, now—he's crazy about my learning it—and I hate it. Do you know Greek?"
Christopher laughed shortly. "Where does he live?" he inquired mockingly.
For a moment the boy looked at him perplexed. "It's a language," he replied gravely; "and grandpa says it comes handy in a bargain, but I won't learn it. I hate school, anyway, and he swears he's going to send me back in two weeks. I hope I'll fall ill, and then he can't."
"In two weeks," repeated the other reflectively; "well, a good deal may happen, I reckon, in two weeks."
"Oh, lots!" agreed the boy with enthusiasm; "you'll let me chase rabbits with you every day—won't you? and teach me to shoot? and we'll go 'possum hunting one night and not get home till morning. It will be easy enough to fool grandpa. I'll take care of that, and if Aunt Saidie finds it out she'll never tell him—she never does tell on me. Here, let me take the gun awhile, will you?"
Christopher handed him the gun, and they went on rapidly along the old road under the honey locusts that grew beyond the bend. They were nearing the place where Christopher, as a child of twelve, had waited with his birdgun in the bushes to shoot Fletcher when he came in sight, and now as the recollection returned to him he unconsciously slackened his pace and cast his eyes about for the spot where he had stood. It was all there just as it had been that morning—the red clumps of sumach covered with gray dust, the dried underbrush piled along the fence, and the brown honeyshucks strewn in the sunny road. For the first time in his life he was glad at this instant that he had not killed Fletcher then—that his hand had been stayed that day to fall the heavier, it might be, at the appointed time. The boy still chatted eagerly, and when presently the hounds scented a rabbit in the sassafras beyond the fence, he started with a shout at the heels of the pursuing pack. Swinging himself over the brushwood, Christopher followed slowly across the waste of lifeeverlasting, tearing impatiently through the flowering net which the wild potato vine cast about his feet.