We found Uncle Jeb smoking his pipe under the lean-to of the boarded-up cooking shack looking for all the world as if he were waiting for some rattling old stage-coach which he was to pilot across the scorching western plain. There was peace in his keen gray eyes and a refreshing whiff of the prairies in his brown, furrowed skin and drooping, gray moustache.
“Waiting for the boys to come, Uncle Jeb?” I asked, after the greeting.
“They’ll be comin’ purty quick naow, I reckin,” he drawled.
“Find it lonesome here?”
“’Tain’t never lonesome,” he said, “but I like to see the youngsters coming.”
“I suppose you know that Roy and I together are going to write some stories about Temple Camp,” I ventured, as a pleasantry.
He looked at Roy with a humorous twinkle in his eye.
“And we’re going to put you in, Uncle Jeb,” said Roy.
“Thar’s a youngster over yonder would fit into a story-book,” Uncle Jeb drawled, “kind of a char-ac-ter, as you might say. Lives over thar through the woods whar you see the smoke goin’.”
He told us we would probably find Tom over that way for he had gone after milk. So we took our way along the woods path, which was filled with memories for Roy, until we came to a road with open country beyond, which, being private land, he had never crossed before. Perhaps a hundred yards or so distant stood an old white farmhouse with the familiar paraphernalia of barnyard and adjacent outbuildings, making, I thought, a pleasant scene of old-fashioned farm life.