There had been a "cop" in the story. Tommy did not know what a cop was until Joe told him. "Dam ol' cop" was the phrase, to be exact. The cop had chased him, then Joe had run away. It seemed that he didn't stop running for a long time. There was also the driver of a motor truck in the story, Mike by name. Mike drove the truck that carried an oil tank from the city to a town. Mike had given him a lift; Mike often did that. When they got out in the country here, Joe had asked Mike to let him down—he wanted to get some blackberries. Mike had said he would pick Joe up on the way back.
Such was the thriller Tommy had listened to. It hadn't come easy, this story, but only after repeated questions. Now and then, while he was telling it, Joe had looked at Tommy with a wry, wise grin, as if sizing him up. He was little, and he couldn't talk plainly, but he seemed old somehow. We live in deeds, not in years, as the poet says.
Joe was still grinning when they came into the back yard. He had held back a time or two, as if he were afraid of that big house on the hill, but Tommy had over-persuaded him. There wasn't anybody at home, he had declared, but there were biscuits and jam in the kitchen.
Halfway between the barn lot and the house they were confronted by Aunt Cindy. She was an enormous black woman, dressed always in starched gingham and apron, with a red bandanna handkerchief on her head.
"Whar you been, honey?" she demanded; then sternly: "Whose chile dat you got wid you?"
Tommy did not reply; in fact, he didn't know; what's more, he didn't care. It was Joe, that was enough.
She was towering above them now.
"Who yo' ma an' pa, chile?" she demanded of the miniature Marco Polo who had come home with her charge. "Whar you come from?"
Marco Polo did not reply. He only grinned up at her, an impertinent, scrappy sort of grin. In a hard school he had learned the virtue of silence.
"I found him in the woods," volunteered Tommy at last. "He's lost an' he's goin' to stay wif me."