bought store dress, and that the man's hair was wet with something
more than water. The thick locks had been combed and were
glistening with oil, and the boy knew these facts for signs of
courtship; and though he was contemptuous, they furnished the
excuse he sought and made escape easy. Noiselessly he wielded his
hoe for a few moments, scooped up a handful of soft dirt, meshed
the worms in it, and slipped the squirming mass into his pocket.
Then he crept stooping along the fence to the rear of the house,
squeezed himself between two broken palings, and sneaked on tiptoe
to the back porch. Gingerly he detached a cane fishing-pole from a
bunch that stood upright in a corner and was tiptoeing away, when
with another thought he stopped, turned back, and took down from
the wall a bow and arrow with a steel head around which was wound
a long hempen string. Cautiously then he crept back along the
fence, slipped behind the barn into the undergrowth and up a dark
little ravine toward the green top of the spur. Up there he turned
from the path through the thick bushes into an open space, walled
by laurel-bushes, hooted three times surprisingly like an owl, and
lay contentedly down on a bed of moss. Soon his ear caught the
sound of light footsteps coming up the spur on the other side, the
bushes parted in a moment more, and a little figure in purple
homespun slipped through them, and with a flushed, panting face
and dancing eyes stood beside him.

The boy nodded his head sidewise toward his own home, and the girl
silently nodded hers up and down in answer. Her eyes caught sight
of the bow and arrow on the ground beside him and lighted eagerly,
for she knew then that the fishingpole was for her. Without a word
they slipped through the bushes and down the steep side of the
spur to a little branch which ran down into a creek that wound a