In one of the windows hung the wooden cage I had made for Joey’s magpie. But the windows themselves were my chief pride. I had procured them from an old house-boat that had been abandoned by a party of fishermen, and had drifted down the river to anchor itself before my workshop. There were four of these windows, with tiny mullioned panes, and I had hung them, two on either side of a door that opened out on a rustic pergola I had erected. The pergola led to a bosky dell of green—a veritable bower—where wild honeysuckle hung its bells in the sweet syringa bushes, and wild forget-me-not and violets and kinnikinic gemmed the emerald banks of a limpid pool so hedged in by high green thickets that no eye save the initiated ever rested on its crystal clarity. We called this spot the Dingle Dell, and the Dingle was a rare retreat for Joey on the occasion of any embarrassing caller.
As I blew out the candles that night and lay down beside the little lad, he murmured sleepily: “Bell Brandon ain’t so terrible hard to play on the flute—but it’s terrible hard on a guitar; a guitar makes blisters on your fingers.”
He spoke again almost unintelligibly. “I don’t like that man. He never spoke to me once, Mr. David. Any one, ’most, speaks to a boy.”
In the middle of the night I awakened. Joey was sitting up in bed.
“A star’s out, Mr. David. I’m making a wish,” he whispered.
“Well, well,” I yawned drowsily, “lie down—you’ll take cold.”
He cuddled obediently beneath the blankets. “I’m wishing the big man would go, but I’m wishing you’d sleep with me just the same, Mr. David. I sleep tighter when the coyotes holler.”
CHAPTER X
JINGLES BRINGS A MESSAGE
JOEY did not get his wish concerning the departure of the big man, for the next morning the big man was in no condition to go anywhere. He was still lying in his bunk when I went through the room to build the kitchen fire; and when breakfast was ready, he had not roused even to the strains of “Bell Brandon” played on Joey’s flute.
I stood over him, and he looked up at me with lack-lustre eyes, attempted to rise and rolled back on his pillow like a log.