And to-night as his feet pressed his old stamping-ground beneath that apple-tree beside the house, while the wind raked the marshes and whipped his thoughts into dusty confusion, the old waste impulses which prompted the trick were mysteriously whirled uppermost again.
The mischievous tide rip boiled in him once more.
Just as he became conscious of its yeasty bubbling, his foot touched something on the ground—a hard winter apple. He picked it up and threw it against the house, imposing silence on his dog by dictatorial gesture and word.
There was a stir within the paintless dwelling. Through the blurred window-panes he caught sight of a shrunken form moving.
“Ha! there’s the old ‘witch’ herself. She looks like a withered corn-stalk with all those odds and ends of shawls dangling about her. Ssh-ssh! Blinkie. Down, doggie! Quiet, sir!”
Leon’s fingers groped upon the ground, where twilight shadows were merging into darkness, for another apple. Since he enlisted as a boy scout mischief had been sentenced and shut up in a dark little cell inside him. But Malign Habit, though a captive, dies hard.
Those seeking fingers touched something else, a worm-eaten shingle blown from the old roof. He picked it up and considered it in the darkness, while his left hand felt in his pocket for some twine.
“Gee! it would be a great night for that trick to work,” he muttered with a low chuckle that had less depth to it than a parrot’s. “The wind is just in the right direction—driving straight through the house. Eh, Blink! Shall we ‘get her on a string’ again?”
The dog whined softly with impatience. Of late, in his short excursions with his master, he had not been used to such stealthy doings. With the exception of the trailing expeditions through the woods from which canines were debarred, movements had been open, manly, and aboveboard since the master became a boy scout.
But Leon had forgotten that he was a scout, had momentarily forgotten even the outdoor test in Sparrow Hollow, and the necessary preparations therefor.