“Wait a moment, Dick; you’re a very bad story-teller. You should always stage your characters: you should have described the azaleas first and the scenery. Well, go on.”
“Bother the azaleas!” said Dick. They were fast getting into the old boy-and-girl way of talking to each other, a somewhat dangerous language at thirty. “It doesn’t matter whether they come in first or last. Where was I? Oh yes. Mac suddenly said: ‘Look there!’ I looked, and there sure enough was a child amidst the azaleas. She hadn’t been there a few seconds before, and Mac would have it that she had been ‘fetched’; it was a pretty wild country and no houses around, and there she was, just as if she had stepped out of a house, plucking away at the azalea blossoms for all she was worth, a tiny dot in a blue kimono and scarlet obi. I stole up behind her.”
“I’d have caught her up and kissed her.”
“Just what I did, in fact; and it may have been fancy, but she seemed slipping through my fingers like—grease till I kissed her, and she became solid.”
“There’s one thing, Dick, you’ll never make a poet. Well, go on; it’s awfully interesting.”
“We carried her off to Nikko. No parents could be found to own her, so I adopted her.”
“That was a funny thing. As we turned the bend of the road we saw him away up in a gorge of the hills. He was still running for all he was worth, beating about him with his stick as if hitting off devils, and dashing himself against trees in a quite regardless manner.”
“How awful!”
“Well, frankly, it was, and it had a sequel, for his dead body was found miles away some days after, and the Japanese police said the trees had beaten him to death, which they practically had.”