"Gosh, isn't that wonderful!" exclaimed Lydia. The boy, who was a little taller than Lydia, led the way to the open s.p.a.ce between his home and Lydia's. Then he spun Lydia a brisk ball.

"It's like a shooting star," she cried, spinning back a quick overhand shot, "but it makes your hands smell like anything."

"Lydia," called her father from the bow window, "it's time to come in."

"All right!" Then aside to Kent, "I'll wait till he calls me twice more, Kent. Keep them coming."

"Lydia!"

"Yes, Dad. Not so hard, Kent. Don't throw curves, just because I can't."

"Lydia! I shan't call again."

"Coming, Dad! Good night, Kent. Face tag!"

"Face tag yourself, smarty. Maybe I'll be over, to-morrow, if I ain't got anything better to do."

Lydia sauntered slowly up to the kitchen steps. "Well, I haven't anything pleasant at all to look forward to now," she thought. "The circus parade is over and I've returned the balloon. Gee, yes, there is too! I didn't eat my cake yet!"

She turned up the lamp in the kitchen and foraged in the cake box, bringing out the cake Lizzie had saved for her. With this in her hand she entered the dining-room. An extraordinarily long, thin man was stretched out in one arm chair, Amos in the other.

"You ought to sit in the parlor, Dad," said Lydia, reproachfully.

"It's too stuffy," said Amos.

"Oh, h.e.l.lo, young Lydia!" said the tall man. "Come here and let me look at you."

Levine drew the child to his knee. She looked with a clear affectionate gaze on his thin smooth-shaven face, and into his tired black eyes.

"Why do you always say 'young' Lydia?" asked the child.

"That's what I want to know, too," agreed Amos.

"Because, by heck! she's so young to be such an old lady." He smoothed the short curly hair with a gesture that was indescribably gentle. "I tell you what, young Lydia, if you were ten years older and I were ten years younger--"

Lydia leaned against his knee and took a large bite of cake. "You'd take me traveling, wouldn't you, Mr. Levine?" she said, comfortably.

"You bet I would, and you should have your heart's desire, whatever that might be. If any one deserves it you do, young Lydia."

Amos nodded and Lydia looked at them both with a sort of puzzled content as she munched her cake.

"I brought a newly ill.u.s.trated copy of 'Tom Sawyer' for you to see, Lydia," said Levine. "Keep it as long as you want to. It's over on the couch there."

Lydia threw herself headlong on the book and the two men returned to the conversation she had interrupted.

"My loan from Marshall comes due in January," said Amos. "My lord, I've got to do something."

"What made you get so much?" asked Levine.

"A thousand dollars? I told you at the time, I sorta lumped all my outstanding debts with the doctor's bill and funeral expenses and borrowed enough to cover."

"He's a skin, Marshall is. Why does he live on this street except to save money?"

Lydia looked up from "Tom Sawyer." There were two little lines of worry between her eyes and the little sick sense in the pit of her stomach that always came when she heard money matters discussed. Her earliest recollection was of her mother frantically striving to devise some method of meeting their latest loan.

"I'd like to get enough ahead to buy a little farm. All my folks were farmers back in New Hampshire and I was a fool ever to have quit it.

It looked like a mechanic could eat a farmer up, though, when I was a young fellow. Now a little farm looks good enough to me. But on a dollar and a half a day, I swan--" Amos sighed.

"Land's high around here," said Levine. "I understand Marshall sold Eagle Farm for a hundred dollars an acre. Takes a sharp farmer to make interest on a hundred an acre. Lord--when you think of the land on the reservation twenty miles from here, just yelling for men to farm it and nothing but a bunch of dirty Indians to take advantage of it."

"Look here, John," said Amos with sudden energy. "It's time that bunch of Indians moved on and gave white men a chance. I wouldn't say a word if they farmed the land, but such a lazy, lousy outfit!"

"There are more than you feel that way, Amos," replied Levine. "But it would take an Act of Congress to do anything."

"Well, why not an Act of Congress, then? What's that bunch we sent down to Washington doing?"

"Poor brutes of Indians," said John Levine, refilling his pipe. "I get ugly about the reservation, yet I realize they've got first right to the land."

"The man that can make best use of the land's got first right to it,"

insisted Amos. "That's what my ancestors believed two hundred and fifty years ago when they settled in New Hampshire and put loopholes under the eaves of their houses. Our farmhouse had loopholes like that. Snow used to sift in through 'em on my bed when I was a kid."

Lydia, lying on her stomach on the couch, turning the leaves of "Tom Sawyer," looked up with sudden interest.

"Daddy, let's go back there to live. I'd love to live in a house with loopholes."

The two men laughed. "You should have been a boy, Lydia," said Amos.

"A boy," sniffed Levine, "and who'd have mothered little Patience if she'd been a boy?"

"That's right--yet, look at that litter on the desk in the parlor."

Both the men smiled while Lydia blushed.

"What are you going to do with that doll furniture, Lydia?" asked John Levine.

"I'm going to make a doll house for little Patience, for Christmas."

Lydia gave an uncomfortable wriggle. "Don't talk about me so much."

"You're working a long way ahead," commented Amos. "That was your mother's trait. I wish I'd had it. Though how I could look ahead on a dollar and a half a day--Lydia, it's bedtime."

Lydia rose reluctantly, her book under her arm.

"Don't read upstairs, child," Amos went on; "go to bed and to sleep, directly."

Lydia looked around for a safe place for the book and finally climbed up on a chair and laid it on the top shelf of the sideboard. Then she came back to her father's side and lifted her face for her good night kiss.

"Good night, my child," said Amos.

"How about me," asked Levine. "Haven't you one to spare for a lonely bachelor?"