“But what was your name?” insisted Booge. “What did you say your name was when anybody said, 'What's your name, little boy?'”
“Buddy,” said the boy.
“Buddy what?” urged Booge.
“Mama's Buddy.”
Booge drew a deep breath. For five minutes more he questioned the boy, while Buddy grew more and more impatient to be at the wagon-making. Of Buddy's past Peter had, of course, never told Booge a word, but the tramp had his own idea of it. He felt that Peter was no ordinary shanty-boat man, and he imputed Peter's silence regarding the boy's past and parentage to a desire on Peter's part to shake himself free from that past. Why was Peter continually telling that he had begun a more respectable life? Peter's wife might have been one of the low shanty-boat women, a shiftless mother and a worse than shiftless wife, running away from Peter only to bring back the boy when he became a burden, taking what money Peter had and going away again. Possibly Peter had never been married to the woman. In digging into Buddy's memories Booge hoped to find some thread that would give him a hold on Peter, however slight. Booge liked the comfortable boat, but deeper than his love of idleness had grown an affection for the cheerful boy and for simple-minded Peter. If Peter had chosen this out-of-the-way slough for his winter harbor—when shanty-boat people usually came nearer the towns—in order that he might keep himself in hiding from the troublesome wife, veiling himself and the boy from discovery by giving out that he and Buddy were uncle and nephew, it was no more than Booge would have done.
“I suppose, when your ma come to the boat, she slept in the bunk, didn't she?” asked Booge.
“Yes, Uncle Booge,” said Buddy. “I want you to make a wagon.”
“All right, bo!” said Booge gleefully. “Come ahead and make a wagon. And when Uncle Peter comes back we'll have a nice surprise for him. We'll shout out at him, when he comes in, 'Hello, Papa!' and just see what he says. That'll be fun, won't it?”
Booge worked on the wagon all morning.
Toward noon he made a meal for himself and Buddy, and set to work on the wagon again. He had found a canned-corn box that did well enough for the body, and he chopped out wheels as well as he could with the ax. He wished, by the time he had completed one wheel, that he had told Buddy it was to be a sled rather than a wagon, but he could not persuade the boy that a sled would be better, and he had to keep on.