A Son of the City | Page 7

home the back way, then," said Silvey.
The return home by way of the railroad tracks was ever their route
when a fishing trip had been unsuccessful, for it avoided conveniently
all notice by jeering playmates.
"Don't you wish we'd landed that big fellow?" breathed John, half to
himself, as he reviewed mentally that thrilling struggle on the pier.
"Just don't you, though!" echoed Bill, regretfully.
They walked on for some minutes in silence. As they left the cement
walk for the little footpath which led across the corner vacant lot to a
break in the railroad fence, Silvey roused himself.
"What you going to say to your mother?"
John shrugged his shoulders. "Don't know. What you going to say to
yours?"
So they fell to planning their excuses.

CHAPTER II
IN WHICH HE GOES TO SCHOOL
But an hour had passed since his protesting assertion that "Once doesn't
matter, Mother, and anyway, it's school time," had been followed by
flight to the many-windowed, red-brick building, and already the
surroundings of dreary blackboard, dingy-green calsomine, and
oft-revarnished yellow pine woodwork were becoming irksome. The
spelling lesson had not been so unpleasant, for he could sense the tricky
"ei-s" and "ie-s" with uncanny cleverness, but 'rithmetic--the very name
oppressed him. What use could be found in such prosy problems as "A
and B together own three-hundred acres of land. A's share is twice as
much as B's. How much does each own?" Or "A field contains four
hundred square yards. One side is four times as long as the other. What
are its dimensions?"
Miss Brown closed the hated, brown-covered book and turned to write
the arithmetic homework on the blackboard. Instantly John's attention
wandered to objects and sounds far more interesting than the barren,
sultry school room.
A couple of sparrows flew from the roof of the school to the window
ledge nearest him, intent on their noisy quarrel, and he gave a scarcely
perceptible sigh. Birds could enjoy the sunshine unmolested--why not
he? A horse sounded a rapid tattoo of hoof beats over the heated street
macadam below and he longed--as he had longed for the launch that
morning--for a vehicle which would take him along untraveled roads to
a country where schools were not, and small boys fished and played
games the long days through. Next, a three-year-old stubbed her toe
against the street curbing opposite the school and voiced her grief with
unrestrained and therefore enviable freedom. John stirred uneasily and
meditated upon the interminable stretch of four days which must elapse
before Saturday. Then a majestic thunderhead in the blazing September
sky caught his attention and the miracle happened.
He was on his back in the big field of his uncle's Michigan farm, gazing

upward at the white, rapidly shifting clouds. The unimpeded western
breeze made little harmonies of sound as it swept through the tall,
waving grass; strange birds carolled joyously from the orchard by the
road, and near at hand the old, brown Jersey lowed lovingly to her
ungainly calf. From the more distant chicken coop came the cackle of
hens and the boastful crowing of a rooster.
A shift of the thought current, and the fat, easy-going team dragged the
lumbering, slowly moving wagon over the four-mile stretch of sand
road to town, while he sat on the driver's seat to listen to the hired
man's tales of army service in the Philippines, or to watch the
ever-shifting panorama of flower and bird and animal life which he
loved so well. Past the ramshackle farm of the first neighbor to the
north, past the little deserted country school house, past the
pressed-steel home of a would-be agriculturist, which had rusted to an
artistic red, and down to the winding river which flanked the hamlet
through banks lined with white birches and graceful poplars--"popples"
the hired man called them. There was good fishing in the river, too.
Once a twenty pound muskellunge had been caught, and bass were
plentiful.
But better still than that was his uncle's well-stocked trout stream.
Again he stumbled over the root-obstructed footpath which ran along
the east bank, stopping now and then to untangle his hook and line as
he forced his way past thick, second-growth underbrush, or to let his
hook float with the current past some particularly promising bit of
watercress. There was the fallen, half-rotted log under which the swift
current had dug a deep hole in the sandbed for the big fellows to haunt
and pounce out upon bits of food which floated by. How his heart had
gone pitapat when he had discovered it and had quietly, oh, so quietly,
dropped his baited hook into the clear, spring water. Then had come a
swift-darting something up stream, a jerk at his line to set his pulses