Gordon left his auto on the main road, extinguished its lamps and went back toward the woods afoot, hoping to encounter his nimble foster-cousin.
“All right, you little wildcat,” he snapped as he returned to his machine an hour later. “Get lost if you want! But believe me, next time I get you alone, it’ll be where there’s no sand to throw in my eyes. A catty woman’s dirty trick! We’ll see!”
CHAPTER XIII
GOD AND THINGS
I
A favorite retreat for most of the Paris boys in those days was the region known as “down the river.” From the Process Works dam to the mill pond at Hastings Crossing flowed a wide, smooth body of water between indolent, pastoral hills and fern-clogged, wooded shores musty with swamp bog or rotting second-growth.
Often Nathan and I borrowed Pete Collins’ old red scow, let the current carry us dreamily down-stream in the afterglow, to work our way slowly homeward under the stars. The hills, mist-haunted, were exotic in those late evening hours. Trees in the silhouetted woods rose weird against the sky. It was not difficult to imagine ourselves back in Neolithic ages,—those trees rising out of decaying fens, with outlandish shapes wallowing in the bogs along the shore.
They were pleasant, never-to-be-forgotten nights,—those trips down the river. To the dull, rhythmic knock of oars in creaky oarlocks, and the drip of warm water as we disturbed the far-flung expanse of fallen stars, we talked of many things. Our elders might have smiled if they had heard. But then, if our elders could have heard, we would never have given those long, long thoughts expression.
One sultry sunset we had gone down the river and were opposite Haskell’s clearing on our return, when Nathan, who was lying along the boat’s bottom, with arms behind his head, remarked in his slow, meditative way:
“Billy—did you ever wonder about the stars?”