Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/264

 offered a weasel and two laying hens, out and out, if he would recount in secret to the inquisitive but briefly unimaginative Piggie Brennan the final details of that adventure with the sorrow-laden ghost. At this offer, of course. Lonely shook a listless and disdainful head, and he only felt the edge of his blood-stained knife cogitatively, as Em'ly Bird asserted her firm belief that the story never did have an end, anyway—which may have been truer than most of that disgruntled audience realized.

Old Ezra Witherspoon, the town constable, beholding that silent little group clustered about the boy, inwardly surmised that mischief of some sort was brewing, and turned his steps in the direction of Lonely, as that guileless youth slipped his long-bladed knife deftly back into its secret pocket.

"Oh, here's that old fossil again!" exclaimed Lulu Bird, testily and not inaudibly, as the impassive old constable proceeded to make himself at home on the outskirts of the little crowd. Lulu Bird and the constable had had a misunderstanding, of late, as to the ravaging of a certain pansy-bed in the Park.

"Fossil—what 's a fossil?" asked Pinkie.