I gladly went ahead of him and he was following me quite nicely when suddenly he stopped.
"Pony-Boy," he said, "I hate these forests with their sour-faced trees."
This was a new thought to me and I turned it over in my mind.
"They've got brains in their tossing heads," he said. "They used to be wicked giants and some great power turned them into these wooden things with waving arms that beg us to come in and be choked to death."
What kind of a boy was this, I wondered. He talked something like a girl and something like a lad who had always had his nose in a story-book. Well, he wasn't dull anyway. I love to have boys talk to me. Some of them treat me as if I were an animated rocking-horse with no brains at all. So I stepped along quite happily while he went on talking to himself.
"I wonder why my father let me come here. This bird of mystery has certainly flown to one queer place. The whole trip was owlish. After I left the cities there were forests like these, then lakes and rivers and more lakes and rivers. Then that awful drive in a democrat over rocks and rills and corduroy roads. My bones are most racked apart."
So that was why he didn't want to ride me, I thought. Poor lad! he was tired.
"Pony-Boy," he said, laying a timid finger on the tip of one of my ears, "I'm not afraid exactly, but I don't like spooky woods and queer silent waiting people. That old settler who drove me in wouldn't open his mouth and his name is Talker—what do you think of that?"
I was amused. This queer man had brought me in the evening before tied to the tail of his cart. He had taken me from a steamer that came to a big lake, and all the way in he had said nothing but "Get up" to his old grey mare, who had not deigned to pass the time of day with me. They were a pair—but I must listen to the boy who was speaking quite earnestly now.
"Why in the name of old King Log did my father send me to spend the summer in this eerie place? Is there no country air south of these wads of Canadian forest?"