"Now, Mother," he said, "it's been nigh onto fourteen years since anybody saw a man-eating lion in Bennett's Woods."
"Hmph!" Gram snorted. "It might not be so funny if that boy had strayed into the woods and got lost."
"But he didn't get lost," Gramps said reasonably. "Bud and me, we met out in the woods and had us a good long talk."
Something in Gramps' voice turned Gram's frown into a smile.
"Well, you're both here now and I suppose that's what matters. Allan, sit down and eat your pie and drink your milk."
"I'm really not hungry," Bud protested.
"Pooh! All boys are hungry all the time. Sit down and eat."
"Yes, ma'am."
He sat down, took a long drink of the cold milk, ate a fork full of pie and found that he was hungry after all. Looking around Gram's kitchen as he ate, he thought of the one at the orphanage where, in spite of the thousands of dishes he had wiped there and the bushels of potatoes he had peeled, he had never been invited to sit down to a glass of cold milk and a cut of pie. It was a very disquieting thing, and his wariness mounted. He looked furtively around again for a trap, but Gram had returned to her knitting and Gramps was delving into a leather-covered case.
Gramps' case was a homemade thing divided into a number of small compartments. One by one, he took from their respective compartments an assortment of varicolored objects and arranged them on a piece of newspaper. They looked like insects but were made from tiny bits of feathers and wisps of hair. Each one was arranged about a hook. The biggest was not large and the smallest was so tiny and so fragile that it looked as if the merest puff of wind would whirl it away. Bud looked on agog.