Page:Arthur Stringer-The Loom of Destiny.djvu/149

Thicker than Water Captain's stories sometimes frightened Georgie a bit, but then he practised with his air-gun every day, on porpoises, and the Captain acknowledged that Indians were n't a bit harder to shoot than porpoises, only you can never tell, of course, just when you do hit a porpoise.

So when Georgie and his air-gun landed in New York and he found that city a place with houses in it very much like London, and was taken to his Uncle Charley's home and found it very much like their own house in Portland Place, though not quite so gloomy-looking, he was disappointed beyond words. Here his father left him and hurried away to Washington. Now he had been three weeks in America and had not seen one Wild Indian!

In fact, instead of being the hunter, Georgie had been the hunted. When he had loaded up his air-gun and made his appearance on the street, a number of very dirty boys made fun of his Eton jacket and his white collar and his little dicer, and called him "monkey," and threw things at him, and forced him to beat a hasty retreat homeward. 137