Page:Cornelia Meigs-The Pirate of Jasper Peak.djvu/17

 A soft pad, pad on the boards behind him made him turn his head as a man walked swiftly  past. Hugh saw that his shapeless black hat had a speckled feather stuck into the band and that  he wore, instead of shoes, soft rounded moccasins edged with a gay embroidery of beads. Plainly the man was an Indian. At the thought the boy's heart beat a little faster. He had not known there would be Indians!

His own being in Rudolm was simple enough, although somewhat unexpected. Hugh's father was a doctor, enrolled in the Medical Reserve  since the beginning of the war but not until this  month ordered away to France. The problem of where Hugh should live during his absence was a  difficult one since Hugh had no mother and there  were no immediate relatives to whom he could go. He had finished school but had been judged rather too young for college, and, so his father maintained in spite of frantic pleading, much too  young to enlist.

“I’m sixteen," was the boy's insistent argument, but—