We came on him as he was distributing nickels destined for the peanut man that had just got his wagon going, savory. Nick didn't see us till we were right there, and then the nicest shamefaced look come over him, and he threw the rest of the nickels among the boys and left them scrambling, and met us.
"Nick Nordman! Is this your doings?" Silas plumped it at him, accusing.
"Gosh, no!" says Nick, grinning like a schoolboy. "It's the kids' doin's."
And when a millionaire can say "Gosh" like he said it, you can't feel remote from him. Nobody could. Oh, how we talked at him, all round, a good many at a time. And I think everything there was to say, we said it. Anyway, I can't think of any exclamation to speak of that we left unexclaimed.
We all streamed up the slope, Silas near walking backward most of the way to take in the full magnitude of it. We sat down round the potato salad and the deviled eggs and the veal loaf, beaming. And it made a real nice minute.
Oh, and it was no time till we got to living over the old days. And it was no time till Timothy and Eppleby were rolling over, recalling this and bringing back that. It was no time at all till every one of us was back twenty-five to thirty years, and telling about it. And Lucy, that I'd maneuvered should sit by Nick, I caught her looking across at me kind of superior, and as if she could have told me, all the while, that something or other was so!
"Let's us drink him a toast," says Timothy Toplady when we got through. "Look-at here: To Nicholas Nordman, the big man of Friendship Village."
"Yes, sir!" says Silas Sykes. "And to Nicholas Nordman, that's give us ten thousand dollars and a circus!"
"No, sir!" says Eppleby Holcomb, sudden. "None of them things. Let's us drink just to Nick Nordman, that's come back home!" He up with his hand, and it came down on Nick Nordman's shoulder with a sound you could have heard all acrost the grounds.
And as he did that, just for a fraction of nothing, Nick Nordman met my eyes. And we both knew what we both knew.