“’Mom Baldwin,’ who lives in that old baldfaced house ’way over on the salt-marshes!” Colin hooted. “Pshaw! she ought to wash her clothes at the Witch Rock, where Dark Tammy was made to wash hers, over a hundred years ago. I guess Leon knows the way to Varney’s Paintpot anyhow,” he advanced clinchingly.
“What sort of queer Paintpot is that?” Nixon Warren spoke; his stranger’s part in the conversation was limited to putting excited questions.
“It’s a red-ochre swamp—a bed of moist red clay—that’s hidden somewhere in the woods,” Colin explained. “The Indians used it for making paint. So did the farmers, hereabouts, until a few years ago. I believe it’s mostly dried up now.”
“Whoopee! if we could only find it, we might paint ourselves to our waists, make believe we were Indians and go yelling through the woods!” Nixon’s eye sparkled like sun-touched granite, and Colin parted with the last lingering suspicion of his being a flowerpot fellow.
This suggestion settled it. Starrie Chase, otherwise Leon, might let his boyish energy leak off as waste steam in planting another thorn in the side of the hard-worked doctor who bore the burdens of half the community, and in persecuting lonely old women, but—he was supposed to know the way to Varney’s Paintpot!
And the three started along the road to find him.
The quest did not lead them far. Rounding a bend in the highroad, they came abruptly upon Leon Starr Chase, familiarly called Starrie, almost a fifteen-year-old boy, of Nixon’s age.
He was leaning against a low fence above the marshes, holding a dead bird high above the head of a very lively fox-terrier whose tan ears gesticulated like tiny signal flags as he jumped into the air to capture it, with a short one-syllabled bark.
“Ha! you can’t catch it, Blink—and you shan’t have it till you do,” teased his master, lowering its limp yellow legs a little.
The dog’s nose touched them. The next instant he had the bird in his mouth.