Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/25

 He liked the things you had to eat on Sunday and had found that on Sunday he could eat the soft parts out of his bread and hide the crusts under the edge of his plate. Mother always caught him if he tried that on week-days, but on Sundays, with company there, she never said a word.

But no matter how slowly he ate, he was always through, wriggling uncomfortably on his chair and horribly bored, while those tedious grown-up people were still gabbling on. Mother always saw this, took pity, and smiled a permission to him to be off. He slipped from his chair and tiptoed silently into the kitchen where Katie was dressing the salad. But she stopped long enough to open the pasteboard ice-cream box from Schlauchter's candy-store and give him a saucer-full from the soft part on top.

Then he hurried upstairs again to act out with his army the glorious scenes he had been imagining during dinner. Sometimes it was a surprise attack on the march, with cavalry sweeping down on limbered guns, sometimes it was artillery formed in triangles, a muzzle at each apex, blowing the advancing cavalry to flinders. Sometimes it was a magnificent parade of triumph through a city gate with Kaiser Wilhelm (Neale) at their head.

But at any moment, especially as he came on to be ten years old, quite suddenly and inexplicably he grew tired of it. The illusion would pass ... they would be just lifeless stupid dead soldiers, with broken legs and rifles, and the paint flaking off ... impossible to imagine anything with them. Also his arms and legs would feel numb with sitting still on the floor so long. Then Neale would slide noiselessly down the banisters, using his hands and legs as a brake to keep from crashing into the newel-post, slip by the dining-room door with its clinking coffee-cups and blue haze of cigar smoke, grab his cap and go quietly outdoors.

Nobody would have stopped him, he knew that, but it was more fun to keep it quiet. Free from the house he would act out his drama of escape by running for a block or so, and then drop into the roaming boy's slow, zig-zag ramble.

You can walk south or north on Union Hill for miles beyond