“Let me alone! Oh, you beast! These portages aren’t made to go double, Buck. I can’t walk up a tree. Oh, I say!”
A ripping of timber, and from the woods filed a procession. Bob’s maiden garb dripped water, and he was conducted, reluctant, by Buck, who led him along firmly, chanting “Lohengrin.” The others followed, lending a hand. Then the tale was told. The two stranger lads lost strangeness in the telling; and in language of whose color I can give but an echo, they painted the picture of a Homeric battle.
“Bob heard us coming,” Buck began, “and he lit out.”
Hal Harriman was a mighty, square-built, black-headed lad, whose name I had come to reverence. Bob’s accounts of him drew an intellectual giant, eating up the toughest mathematical course in Yale, taking honors in it, asking for more. An inventor Hal Harriman was, who sat at his desk and made machines play about the room. I had come to think of him as the mediæval world thought of Erasmus. I felt a little dizzy, then, when Hal Harriman burst into the conversation on the heels of Buck, like an excited and slangy boy, not like Erasmus.
“The old nut lit out over the river, kicking his legs hidjous,” exploded the genius.
Then something told him he had been slangy; he remembered suddenly that he had never seen me before, and he apologized with blushes in a general way for everything. Nobody noticed, for Donnie’s stammering tongue was jerking out a sentence spaced like telegraphy.
“M-Mrs. M-Morgan, he fell in and sp-p-plashed like a—like a careless wh-whale,” he blew out with difficulty, and at the picture the words recalled, the three youngsters laid hold on each other, and sagged together in laughter. I thought the tale was ended.
“You’re all crazy in the head,” Bob remarked tersely. “But take your time and enjoy yourselves.”
“Me for brevity,” Buck then proclaimed, with dignity. “You see, it was this way, Mrs. Morgan. Bob broke for cover when he heard his friends coming—his friends, you see, I regret to state, whom he’d urged to visit him and—”
“Instead of which he puts on ladies’ clothes and runs,” Hal Harriman broke out. “We don’t know yet why he wears ladies’ clothes. Does he prefer them?”