“Pant! You old trump you!”
It was indeed Pant, the Panther Eye you have known for some time, that strange boy who had accomplished so many seemingly impossible things through his power to see in the night and to perform other magical tricks.
“Why, it’s you!” said Pant, waking up and dragging off his heavy glasses to have a good look at Johnny. “I figured you’d be back sooner or later.”
“Pant,” said Johnny, lowering himself unsteadily into a chair, “there was never a time in all my checkered career when I was so glad to see you.”
“You must be in pretty deep,” grinned Pant, “‘powerful deep,’ they’d say in the mountains.”
“But Pant, what happened?” asked Johnny. “How does it come you left the mountains so soon?”
Pant put on a sad face. “Those mountain people are superstitious, Johnny, terribly superstitious.”
“Are they?”
“Are they? Why look, Johnny, we were having a school election down there, regular kind. Everybody wanted his sister or his cousin or his daughter in as teacher. We were about evenly divided and were fighting it out fair enough with the great American institution, the ballot, when an argument came up in which Harrison Crider, their clerk of election, knocked Cal Nolon out of his chair. Right there is where things began to start. There were fifteen or twenty on a side, all armed and all packed in one room twenty feet square. You can see what it was going to be like, Johnny.” Pant paused to go through the motion of mopping his brow.
“They were all standing there loaded and charged, like bits of steel on the end of a magnet, when a strange thing happened.” He paused to stare at the wall.