On Saturday Willie Trigger swallowed his dinner in an incredibly short space of time, and slipped from the house unobserved, while his mother was in the kitchen haggling with a huckster over the Sunday vegetables. When the good woman re-entered the dining-room she cast one glance at Willie's half depleted plate, then rushed through the dark, cool hall and out upon the porch.
"Will-ee! Will-ee!" she called, stridently.
A rustling of the leaves as the breath of June wafted among them, was her answer. She went to the gate and gazed up and down the street. Then with a sigh she returned to the house and closed the door.
Perhaps Willie had not heard the maternal call. At the instant of its issue he was balanced on the top of the back fence across the street, hidden from the maternal eye by the intervening house. At the second call he plumped down upon a soft ash heap on the other side. If he did hear he gave no sign, but, after dusting his pantaloons with little flips and pats of his small brown hands, he ran with all the speed that he could muster, across the wide, uneven lot. Presently he became lost to sight among the gnarled and broken trees of a once prolific apple orchard, beyond. Issuing from the orchard on the farther side, he crossed another lot—first wriggling wormlike beneath a low wire fence—and came out into the dusty road that led to the old fair ground enclosure. To-day that road, as a wide, smooth street disfigured only by the tracks over which the flat-wheeled trolleys bump, marks the northern boundary of Ann Arbor's ultra exclusiveness. Behind hedges or half hidden amid the trees, nestle snug little houses that seem to cry out against all vulgar intrusion and hug themselves in the very joy of their most obvious respectability.
Along this road, thick with dust; now obscured in a cloud of his own raising, now distinct against the background of the high board fence, Willie Trigger trudged. Arriving at the long ticket window he was dismayed to find that the hatch was shut. Bunny had told him there would be a ticket for him at the window—a ticket for him expressly, in an envelope bearing his name, else he would not have deserted his dinner to be the first on hand. Save for a solitary woman whom he saw among the trees in the wood across the way, the region about appeared deserted. It was not yet one o'clock, but Willie Trigger did not realize this. Stoically he sat down at the edge of the long low platform below the ticket-office window and resigned himself to waiting.
After ten minutes a dog bounded from the wood into the road. Motionless, he regarded the lad curiously. As long as he remained in sight Willie amused himself by throwing stones at him.
After half an hour a carriage drew up close to the fence and stopped. He slouched over to the narrow pedestrians' gate at one side of the office. Two young men, carrying a large, black tin box between them, alighted from the vehicle, paid the driver and entered the enclosure, fastening the gate behind them. When they had disappeared Willie pulled at the gate but suddenly desisted in his attempt to force an entrance as the heavy hatch of the ticket-office fell with a bang and the same two young men were revealed at the weather beaten counter. He watched them as they unlocked the box, on the shiny top of which the bright sun gleamed, and saw one of them take out several big bunches of blue tickets. Willie approached the window, then, hesitatingly. His chin barely touched the edge of the shelf so he stood on his toes.
"Say—my ticket here?" he asked, boldly.
The young man who was arranging the bundles on the shelf looked down.