There weren't. Nevertheless, this was Kingman's field. “See,” said I, trying to be cheerful, “here's where home was.” And I rooted up a potato sprout viciously. “You and Bill Nichols always chose up. You each put a hand round a bat, alternating up the stick, for the first choice. The one who could get his hand over the top enough to swing the bat round his head three times, won, and chose Goodknocker Pratt. First was over there where the wall isn't any more.”
“Remember the time we couldn't find my 'Junior League',” said Old Hundred, “and Goodknocker dreamed it was in a tree, and the next day we looked in the trees, and there it was? I wonder what ever became of old Goodknocker?”
He moved toward first base. The woods had been ruthlessly cut down, and the wall dragged away in the process. We climbed a knoll, through the stumps and dead stuff. At the top was a snake bush.
“Here's something, anyhow,” said Old Hundred. “You were Uncas and I was Hawk Eye, and we defended this snake bush from Bill's crowd of Iroquois. We made shields out of barrel heads, and spears out of young pine-tree tops. Wow, how they hurt!”
“About half a mile over is the swamp where the traps were,” said I. “Let's go. Maybe there's something in one of 'em.”
“Then times would be changed,” said he, smiling a little.
We walked a few hundred feet, and there was the swamp, quite dried up without the protection of the woods, a tangle of dead stuff, and in plain view of half a dozen houses. “Why” cried Old Hundred, “it was miles away from anything!”
I looked at him, a woeful figure, clad in immaculate clothes, with gray gloves, a cane in his hand. “You ought to be wearing red mittens,” said I, “and carrying that old shot-gun, with the ramrod bent.”
“The ramrod was always bent,” said he. “It kept getting caught in twigs, or falling out. Gee, how she kicked! Remember the day I got the rabbit down there on the edge of the swamp? It made the snow all red, poor little thing. I guess I wasn't so pleased as I expected to be.”
“I remember the day you didn't get the wood pussy—soon enough,” I answered.