In the spring the boys fished, and on Saturdays go, up the river or down, or on either side, where one would, one was never out of sight of some thoughtful boy, sitting either on a stump or on a log stretching into the stream, or squatting on a muddy bank with his worm can beside him, throwing a line into the deep, green, quiet water. Always it was to the woods one went to find a lost boy, for the brush was alive with fierce pirates, and blood-bound brother-hoods, and gory Indian fighters, and dauntless scouts. Under the red clay banks that rose above the sluggish stream, robbers' caves, and treasure houses, and freebooters' dens, were filled with boys who, five days in the week and six hours a day, could "amo amas amat, amamus amatus amant" with the best of them. On Sundays these same boys sat with trousers creeping above the wrinkles at the ankles of their copper-toed, red-topped boots, recited golden texts, sang "When He Cometh," and while planning worse for their own little brothers, read with much virtuous indignation of little Joseph's wicked brothers, who put him in a pit. After Sunday School was over these highly respected young persons walked sedately in their best clothes over the scenes of their Saturday crimes.
They say the woods are gone now. Certainly the trees have been cut away and the underbrush burned; cornfields cover the former scenes of valorous achievement; but none the less the woods are there; each nook and cranny is as it was, despite the cornfields. Scattered about the sad old earth live men who could walk blindfolded over the dam, across the millrace, around the bend, through the pawpaw patch to the grapevine home of the "Slaves of the Magic Tree;" who could find their trail under the elder bushes in Boswell's ravine, though they should come—as they often come—at the dead of night from great cities and from mountain camps and from across seas, and fore-gather there, in the smoke and dirt of the rendezvous to eat their unsalted sacrificial rabbit. They can follow the circuitous route around John Betts's hog lot, to avoid the enemy, as easily to-day as they could before the axe and the fire and the plough made their fine pretence of changing the landscape. And when Joe Nevison gets ready to signal them from his seat high in the crotch of the oak tree across the creek, the "Slaves of the Tree" will come and obey their leader. They say that the tree is gone, and that Joe is gone, but we know better; for at night, when the Tree has called us, and we hear the notes from the pumpkin-stem reed, we come and sit in the branches beneath him and plan our raids and learn our passwords, and swear our vengeance upon such as cross our pathway. There may have been a time when men thought the Slaves of the Tree were disbanded; indeed it did seem so, but as the years go by, one by one they come wandering back, take their places in the branches of the magic tree, swing far out over the world like birds, and summon again the genius loci who has slept for nearly forty years.
Of course we knew that Joe would be the first one back; he didn't care what they said—even then; he registered his oath that it made no difference what they did to him or what the others did, he would never desert the Tree. He commanded all of us to come back; if not by day then to gather in the moonlight and bring our chicken for the altar and our eggs for the ceremony, and he promised that he would be there. We were years and years in obeying Joe Nevison. Many of us have had long journeys to go; and some of us lead little children by the hand as we creep up the hollow, crawl through the gooseberry bushes, and 'coon the log over the chasm to our meeting place. But we are nearly all there now; and in the moonlight, when the corn seems to be waving over a wide field, a tree springs up as by magic and we take our places again as of old.
Many years have passed since Marshal Furgeson stood those seven Slaves of the Magic Tree in line before the calaboose door and made them surrender the feathered cork apple-stealers and the sacred chicken hooks. In those years many terrors have ridden the boys who have gone out into the world to fight its dragons and grapple with its gorgons; but never have those boys felt any happiness so sweet as that which rested on their hearts when they heard the Marshal say, "Now you boys run on home—but mind you if I ever——" and he never did—except Joe Nevison. Once it was for boring a hole in the depot platform and tapping a barrel of cider; once it was for going through a window in the Hustler hardware store and taking a box of pocketknives and two revolvers, with which to reward his gang, and finally, when the boy was in the midst of his teens, for breaking into the schoolhouse and burning the books. Joe's father always bought him off, as fathers always can buy boys off, when mothers go to the offended person and promise, and beg, and weep. So Joe Nevison grew up the town bad boy—defiant of law, reckless and unrestrained, with the blood of border ruffianism in his veins and the scorn of God and man and the love of sin in his heart. The week after he left town, and before he was twenty, his father paid for "Red" Martin's grey race horse, which disappeared the night Joe's bed was found empty. In those days the Nevisons had more money than most of the people in our town, but as the years went by they began to lose their property, and it was said that it went in great slices to Joe, to keep him out of the penitentiary.
We knew that Joe Nevison was in the West. People from our town, who seem to swarm over the earth, wrote back that they had met Joe in Dodge City, in Leoti, in No-Man's-Land, in Texas, in Arizona—wherever there was trouble. Sometimes he was the hired bad man of a desert town, whose business it was to shoot terror into the hearts of disturbers from rival towns; sometimes he was a free lance—living the devil knows how—always dressed like a fashion-plate of the plains in high-heeled boots, wide felt hat, flowing necktie, flannel shirt and velvet trousers. They say that he did not gamble more than was common among the sporting men of his class, and that he never worked. Sometimes we heard of him adventuring as a land dealer, sometimes as a cattleman, sometimes as a mining promoter, sometimes as a horseman, but always as the sharper, who rides on the crest of the forward wave of civilization, leaving a town when it tears down its tents and puts up brick buildings, and then appearing in the next canvas community, wherein the night is filled with music, and the cares that infest the day are drowned in bad whiskey or winked out with powder and shot. And thus Joe Nevison closed his twenties—a desert scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it. As he passed into his thirties he left the smoky human crystals that formed on the cow trails and at the mountain gold camps. Cripple Creek became too effete for him, and an electric light in a tent became a target he could not resist; wherefore he went into the sage brush and the short grass, seeking others of his kind, the human rattlesnake, the ranging coyote and the outlawed wolf. Joe Nevison rode with the Dalton gang, raided ranches and robbed banks with the McWhorters and held up stages as a lone highwayman. At least, so men said in the West, though no one could prove it, and at the opening of Lawton he appeared at the head of a band of cutthroats, who were herded out of town by the deputy United States marshals before noon of the first day. Not until popular government was established could they get in to open their skin-game, which was better and safer for them than ordinary highway faring. At Lawton our people saw Joe and he asked about the home people, asked about the boys—the old boys he called them—and becoming possessed of a post-office address, Joe wrote a long letter to George Kirwin, the foreman of our office. We call him old George, because he is still under forty. Joe being in an expansive mood, and with more money on his clothes than he cared for, sent old George ten dollars to pay for a dollar Joe had borrowed the day he left town in the eighties. We printed Joe's letter in our paper, and it pleased his mother. That was the beginning of a regular correspondence between the rover and the home-stayer. George Kirwin, gaunt, taciturn, and hard-working, had grown out of the dreamy, story-loving boy who had been one of the Slaves of the Magic Tree and into a shy old bachelor who wept over "East Lynne" whenever it came to the town opera house, and asked for a lay-off only when Modjeska appeared in Topeka, or when there was grand opera at Kansas City. But he ruled the back office with an iron hand and superintended the Mission Sunday-School across the track, putting all his spare money into Christmas presents for his pupils. After that first letter that came from Joe Nevison, no one had a hint of what passed between the two men. But a month never went by that Joe's letter missed. When Lawton began to wane, Joe Nevison seemed to mend his wayward course. He moved to South McAlester and opened a faro game—a square game they said it was—for the Territory! This meant that unless Joe was hard up every man had his chance before the wheel. Old George took the longest trip of his life, when we got him a pass to South McAlester and he put on his black frock coat and went to visit Joe. All that we learned from him was that Joe "had changed a good deal," and that he was "taking everything in the drug store, from the big green bottle at the right of the front door clear around past the red prescription case, and back to the big blue bottle at the left of the door." But after George came home the Mission Sunday-School began to thrive. George was not afraid of tainted money, and the school got a new library, which included "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn," as well as "Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates" for the boys, and all the "Pansy" books for the girls. It was a quaint old lot of books, and George Kirwin was nearly a year getting it together. Also he bought a new stove for his Sunday-School room, and a lot of pictures for the church walls, among others "Wide Awake and Fast Asleep," "Simply to Thy Cross," and "The Old Oaken Bucket." He gave to the school a cabinet organ with more stops than most of the children could count.
