Indians were supposed to follow trails. Muffs looked up the big road with its little stores and shops and farm houses scattered in between and decided at once that wouldn’t do for a trail. Then she looked down the little road that went through the woods to the house where the Tylers lived. Overhanging trees made it seem like a long tunnel. It reminded her of the subway and shopping trips at home with her mother. She walked slowly, thinking of her mother and their little apartment in New York. They called it “the studio” and it was a tiny place with paintings hanging all about and Muffs’ own little bed hidden behind a green and gold screen. Last night her bed had been hidden behind a curtain on the train. The curtain was green, like those overhanging trees. Suddenly Muffs began to feel very sad and homesick. Then she heard something. It was the strangest sort of thing she had ever heard:
Gilly gilly galoo-oo,
I wonder who are you-oo!
It sounded like a song and it came from a tree almost above her head. She looked up. There, in the branches of the tree, was a little boy about her own age. He was looking down at her with a friendly sort of grin as he kept on chanting the song.
“I wonder who you are too-oo!” Muffs sang back to him.
“I’m a great discoverer,” he said, sliding out of the tree and leaning against its trunk. “My name’s Tommy Tyler.”
“And I’m Miss Muffet. I’m staying with the dragons who live at the end of this road. Didn’t you see the big sign, BEWARE OF DRAGONS? That means Mr. and Mrs. Lippett.”
“I live at the other end,” said Tommy, “with Mom and Daddy and Great Aunt Charlotte and Donald and Mary and the baby.”
“My! What a lot of people!” Muffs exclaimed. “In my family there’s only Mother and me. Daddy went off and left us when I was just three years old. I touched some of his things and he went to the ends of the earth because there aren’t any children there.”
“Did he say that?” questioned Tommy, coming closer to Muffs. He liked this strange little girl from somewhere else. She was so different from his sister, Mary, and all the children he knew at school.