“Now if I cu'd git that Butts family,” he mused, “I'd have something to crow about when I got back to Kingsley to-night. He's got a little farm an' is well to do an' is thrifty, an' if I cu'd only git that class started in the mill an' contented to wuck there, it 'ud open up a new class of people. There's that Archie B.—confound him, he cu'd run ten machines at onct and never know it. I'd like to sweat that bottled mischief out of him a year or two.
“Hello!”
Jud drew his horse up with a jerk. Above him, with legs locked, high up around the body of a dead willow, his seat the stump of a broken bough and fully twenty feet above the employment agent's head, sat Archie B., a freckled-faced lad, with fiery red hair and a world of fun in his blue eyes. He was one of the Butts twins and the very object of the Whipper-in's thoughts. From his head to his feet he had on but three garments—a small, battered, all-wool hat, a coarse cotton shirt, wide open at the neck, and a pair of jeans pants which came to his knees. But in the pockets of his pants were small samples of everything of wood and field, from shells of rare bird eggs to a small supply of Gypsy Juice.
His pockets were miniature museums of nature.
No one but a small boy, bent on fun, knows what Gypsy Juice is. No adult has ever been able to procure its formula and no small boy in the South cares, so long as he can get it.
“The thing that hit does,” Archie B. explained to his timid and pious twin brother, Ozzie B., “is ter make anything it touches that wears hair git up and git.”
Coons, possums, dogs, cats—with now and then a country horse or mule, hitched to the town rack—with these, and a small vial of Gypsy Juice, Archie B., as he expressed it, “had mo' fun to the square inch than ole Barnum's show ever hilt in all its tents.”
Jud stood a moment watching the boy. It was easy to see what Archie B. was after. In the body of the dead tree a wood-pecker had chiseled out a round hole.
“Hello, yo'se'f”—finally drawled Jud—“whatcher doin' up thar?”
“Why, I am goin' to see if this is a wood-pecker's nes' or a fly-ketcher's.”