Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/245

 The boy on the Common now had the kite tied down to his sunburnt bandy-leg, and was slowly and carefully cutting out round pieces of stiff cardboard, to be sent up the taut kite-string as "messengers." His tongue was thrust out a little as he worked, and it moved sympathetically from side to side at every stroke of his knife-blade.

"Oh, Lonely, let me feel how it pulls!" begged Annie Eliza, as she crept up closer to him, blinking raptly up at the blue depths that tented in her sunny world.

"Could n't!" he answered, curtly.

"Just one little pull?"

Lonely shook his head resolutely. This kite-flying business was not a thing for girls to get mixed up in: you had to mind your P's and Q's when you were flying a box-kite, they pulled so!

"Why, first thing you know she 'd start pullin' extra hard—and then where 'd you be?"

"Where?" echoed Annie Eliza, drawing back a little.

"Yanked over into the river, or mebbe Watterson's Crick, before you could remember to let go!"