“How could you know that?” Johnny called into the darkness.
“I have a picture of your thoughts,” came drifting back. “You will not believe. Sometime I shall show you this picture of your thoughts.”
“A—a picture of my thoughts.” Johnny dropped back to his place on the bench. “A picture of my thoughts? How could that be? And yet—
“How could he know?” he repeated after a long period of silence. And indeed how could this little man know all he had told? In regard to the mysterious pitcher the Colonel had discovered for the team, there was a bare chance that someone had talked. They, the three of them, Doug Danby, Colonel Chamberlain, and Johnny, had agreed to keep this a secret for at least one more day.
“Yes,” he thought slowly, “someone might have talked. But that pep meeting! I only decided last night that I’d better not go. And yet he, a strange Chinaman I have never seen before, he comes and tells me what I have thought. How strange! How—how sort of impossible. And yet—
“He said he had a picture of my thoughts. I—I hope he brings it round for me to see.” Laughing a short uncertain laugh, the boy rose from the bench to walk slowly toward his grandfather’s home.
A rather strange city was this one where, for the time, Johnny had a home. No city of its size has a more unusual population. A dozen or more years back it had been a mere village. Only native-born Americans lived there. Then it began to grow. The Chinese people came first. For some reason all his own, a very rich Chinese merchant, Wung Lu, had settled there. In almost no time at all, he had gathered about him a large group of the strange little yellow men. They had erected a Chinese Chamber of Commerce. Men came from afar to bargain here for Oriental goods from across the sea.
“They’re queer, these little yellow men,” Johnny told himself now, “but somehow I like them.”
Yes, though he was not very conscious of it, this was one of Johnny’s great gifts. He had a way of “somehow liking” everyone. And because they somehow came to know this, they liked him in turn. He and Wung Lu, the Chinese merchant who, rumor had it, was immensely rich, had become great friends.
“But this little fellow with the wrinkled face,” he thought, “now who can he be? I supposed I had seen them all. And he is one I could never forget, yet I’ve never seen him before.