“I’m all right, mother.”
She was wisely silent, but she ran over in her mind the spring treatment for children at home. The blood, she felt, should be thinned after a winter of sausages and rich cocoa. She mentally searched her medicine case.
A strange thing happened that day. A broken plate disappeared from the upper shelf of a closet, where Pepy had hidden it; also a cup with a nick in it, similarly concealed; also the heel of a loaf of bread. Nor was that the end. For three days a sort of magic reigned in Pepy’s kitchen. Ten potatoes, laid out to peel, became eight. Matches and two ends of candle walked out, as it were, on their own feet. A tin pan with a hole in it left the kitchen-table and was discovered hiding in Bobby’s bureau, when the Fraulein put away the washing.
On the third day Mrs. Thorpe took her husband into their room and closed the door.
“Bob,” she said, “I don’t want to alarm you. But there is something wrong with Bobby.”
“Sick, you mean?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice was worried. “He’s not a bit like himself. He is always away, for one thing. And he hardly eats at all.”
“He looks well enough nourished!”
“And he comes home covered with mud. I have never seen his clothes in such condition. And last night, when he was bathing, I went into the bathroom. He is covered with scratches.”
“Now see here, mother,” the hunter’s father protested, “you’re the parent of a son, a perfectly hardy, healthy, and normal youngster, with an imagination. Probably he’s hunting Indians. I saw him in the Park yesterday with his air-rifle. Any how, just stop worrying and let him alone. A scratch or two won’t hurt him. And as to his not eating,—well, if he’s not eating at home he’s getting food somewhere, I’ll bet you a hat.”