‘Quit that foolin’, and come here!’
Bang! Bang! Bang!
‘Come here, you mule-headed monkey.’
The Colonel dropped breathless for one moment on all fours, rose to his full height swinging the monstrous branch over his head and sending forth a long loud yell like a man in a nightmare, then swept crashing away into the forest, his weapon thumping like a sledge-hammer as he went.
The monkeys in the trees about chattered applause or commentary, a cloud of sea-fowl flew up from the shore, and the American stood scratching the back of his head thoughtfully in the midst. Then he looked round at the trees and the sea and the pony, taking them all into his confidence with a discomfited smile; pulled himself together and shouted:
‘Colonel!’
He grew contemptuous at the want of an answer, thrust down the ashes in his pipe with a horny finger, and returned slowly to his rest under the shed, consoling his solitude with a slow-flowing murmur of scorn:
‘All right, my child. You wait till you come back. Civalisation! You! You ornary, popeyed, bobtailed, jimber-jawed, jerrybuilt jackass....’
II
The Colonel went through the virgin forest, spending his fury in motion, swinging forward from branch to branch, running, leaping, till the fury was lost in the recovered delight of liberty. Childhood continued, after an irrelevance.