Slowly the man's eyes opened, and, with the daze of sleep still in them, he looked at the professor.
"You're a bum barber, Andrus," he said. "I wouldn't give ye hell room."
The professor did not catch his train that evening. Four old shipmates dined together; and the dinner lasted until it became a supper, and finally a breakfast.
[THE FIRE WORSHIPER]
At the proper age and condition he developed the usual habit of forming mental pictures while looking into a grate fire, and enjoyed the usual introspective calm and comfort therein; but in him, the primordial inheritance also found expression at an age so early that it might have formed a part of his infant reproduction of the Stone Age. From the time he could crawl he loved the fire with the fixed, passionate devotion of the cat, and, like the cat, he would lie contentedly for hours on the rug before the hearth, or, to the scandal of the cook, remove the kitchen stove lids and scorch his face over the glowing coals.
He seemed to possess a salamander-like immunity from its effects; again and again he was burned, but never to the point of fear, utterly disproving the theory that burned children dread the fire. He loved fire, and played with it, setting the carpet of his play-room in flames at the age of three. At five he had made a bonfire of his toys, at seven burned the barn down, and at ten was a past master in the art of building camp fires in the woods—fires without smoke, fires of green wood, wet wood, and rotten wood; fires of great heat and little flame, and fires that went out without constant attention.
In playing Indian he was a valuable comrade, and though we did not meet until the mutations of schoolboy life brought us together in the same class—his early history coming to me later—I found this proficiency the one asset in George Morton's character. He was a high-strung, nervous lad, morbid and erratic at times, cowardly except in reference to fire, and a bully when he dared be. He even lacked the school-boy's sense of honor, which permits stealing anything eatable, and lying for any purpose except self-defense.
Our first meeting was momentous, determining and fixing our mutual attitude, and our nearly common interest in a third person, who was to strongly influence us both. I was crossing a vacant lot which was part of his wealthy father's property when I found him tormenting a small girl of four. He had rigged her doll to the tail of his kite, and was laughing gleefully at her anguish as the inanimate pet soared aloft. I claim no chivalric impulses at the time; I was bad boy of the village—a title I had earned by my health, strength, and willingness to fight—and here was a chance for a fight.
A short conflict ended in victory for me and a new emotion born of the child's happy smile as the doll was restored to her arms. It was solely paternal and protective in its nature, and had I not taken note of the wonderful beauty of the tot it would have remained so; but the pure little face stamped itself on my mind as an earthly picture of the super-human, and, though it made no sexual appeal, it protected me for years against the love affairs of boyhood and youth. She became my goddess, and has remained so.