CHAPTER VII
IN THE WOODS
“What are you doing to-night?” Tom asked, scrutinizing the old man curiously. Then without waiting for an answer he said in his hearty way, “I tell you what you do; come back to camp with me and look us over, knock around there for a day or two and rest up. Nothing but spring water, absolutely guaranteed,” he added pleasantly. “We keep open house at camp, you know, and you’ll be welcome. What d’you say? It’s only about six miles from here across fields.”
“I walked as much as twenty mile a day,” the old man said. “I walked nigh on a thousand mile in the last ten year, I reckon.”
“Well, you’re about due for a little rest,” laughed Tom. “Come on back with me and meet the bunch, they’re just a lot of kids.”
“I travelled one summer with a circus,” the old man said.
“So?” said Tom.
“I sold needles one summer,” the old man added. “I got two dollars for being in a moving picture. You didn’t happen to see that picture?”
“N—no, I didn’t,” Tom answered thoughtfully. The crisp, disinterested way in which the old man enumerated his experiences seemed to preclude the possibility of getting him to discourse upon them. He delivered himself of random items, out of his apparently miscellaneous fund of adventures, in such a choppy way as to seem both amusing and disconcerting.
Tom suspected that his memory might be good enough to recall salient things, but not details. Moreover, it is very hard to discourse familiarly with one who does not look at you. Personal intercourse is quite as much with the eyes as with the voice. Tom had an amused sense of the handicap to conversation in the little old man’s queer way of talking, as if making dogmatic announcements to the world at large.