"If it goes on much longer like this I'll not have to pay for a shot at anybody," returned Gary, with a short laugh.
Gray laughed too, disagreeably, stretching his facial muscles, but no sound issued.
"We're all going crazy together up here; that's my idea," he said. "I don't know which I can stand most comfortably, your voices or your silence. Both make me sick."
"Some day a salamander will nip you; then you'll go loco," observed Gary, balancing another tennis ball in his right hand. "Give me a shot at you?" he added. "I feel as though I could throw it clean through you. You look soft as a pudding to me."
Far, clear, from infinite depths, the elf-like hail of the cuckoo came floating up to the window.
To Flint, English born, the call meant more than it did to Canadian or Yankee.
"In Devon," he said in an altered voice, "they'll be calling just now. There's a world of primroses in Devon.... And the thorn is as white as the damned snow is up here."
Gary growled his impatience and his profile of a Greek fighter showed in clean silhouette against the window.
"Aw, hell," he said, "did I come out here for this?—nine months of it?" He hurled the tennis ball at the wall. "Can the home talk, if you don't mind."
The cuckoo was still calling.