“There’s no such place,” said Ellen. “I know every cranny of this place in my sleep.”
“Well, I know it as if I’d made it,” retorted the boy.
By the time Ellen came back ready to walk, a wave of shyness engulfed the boy; he was as uncommunicative as the Pyramids. He was deeply embarrassed by his companion, but he forgot now and then enough to go ahead, shouting his joy at the return of spring, and then his gayety would fall as a flag at half-mast when he saw Ellen after him. She came home wet and very tired, to listen to the prophecy of her Aunt Sarah that “no good would come of this weltering around in the wet, and that it was just like one of Alec’s unpractical thoughts.”
While Miss Sarah loved Alec, his character annoyed her, winding as it did around a devious road and springing upon you new view-points, as a supposedly quiet road might discover unexpected and romantic vistas of country. Especially his attitude toward the boys was annoying to those who found difficulty in having wood-piles replenished and the “chores” done.
“You’d think boys were something,” my grandmother used to explain with some heat, “besides trying, rascally, little scallywags; but the older you grow, Roberta, the more you’ll find truth in what I say, and that is, that boys were put in this world by the Lord for women to exercise their patience over.”
Tyke Bascom didn’t come again for two days. This time Ellen penetrated through the shyness enough to find that he was a boy who lived over the mountain-road in a little clearing, called Foster’s Corners, which had a sawmill and four houses.
“That’s a long ways,” said Ellen.
“Not so long when you’re used to it,” he replied. “It might be long for a woman.”
In his walks over the mountain, Alec had always stopped at the house and, being fatal to small boys, Tyke had enrolled in the company of Alec’s friends. All that Tyke knew, it turned out, he had been taught by Alec, as he sat there resting on his way home.
For the next two weeks Tyke Bascom came for Ellen, but irregularly. Sometimes he would come each day, for two or three days, and once three days went past, three days when Ellen watched for him. It had been a long time since she had been out in the open air; it had been a long time since she had gone back to the places she had known as a little girl, when she was in that deep and almost mystic communion with all life and growth around her, and when the mountain and the river, and the small mountain streams were like personalities to her. Only the very pure in heart and children have this intimate sense of oneness with the world, and Ellen and Alec had lain for hours, under cover, and watched to see a fox sneak past. They knew a marsh where the blue heron lived, and when she was little, Ellen had talked about the birds, squirrels, and chipmunks as intimately as though they were people.