Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/106

 eyed him reverentially, and brought him little gifts and remembrances, and emulating Annie Eliza, audibly enlarged on the size and strength of his muscles, and the wonder of his circus tricks, and even allowed that Plato was the handsomest horse in Chamboro, and conceded Gilead to be the gentlest and most innocent animal that ever browsed on a flower-bed.

And as for Lonely, he became quite drunk with the dizzy consciousness of his power, and although deep down in his heart he knew it was an illicit and perverted sense of mastery, an unworthy field of conquest, he made it suffice him, for the time being. He passed back and forth among them with a sort of lordly independence, making no return for the hungry and melting eyes which tiny girls made after him, and offering no reward for the patience with which the smaller children waited for him to come out and play, and the celerity with which they gathered chips for him, and cleaned out the stable, and even delivered an occasional special order for bread, without so much as eating one pinch from the soft and temptingly odorous middle of the loaf.

So after that. Lonely went in and out of the