Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/276

 more than a Red Indian. "When he 's a good boy he 's a dead boy, in so far as his youth has been eternally lost to him—just as a good Red Indian 's a dead Red Indian. As for me, I want 'em bad, and like to see 'em bad!"

But, ah, Lonely, Lonely, no matter how that kindly old man of medicine and timely advice and horehound drops may try, he can never hold you up as a model for the young! And no matter how I attempt it myself, Lonely O'Malley, no matter how I extenuate, and repress, and extol—how, indeed, am I ever to paint you as a hero should be painted? How shall I even make you seem half sensible and rational, and not as shatter-pated and mad as a March hare?

For on the very day when he had crawled in under the Johnsons' barn to rescue a homeless cur with a broken watering-can tied to its frenzied tail, and had been bitten at without resentment, and had worked patiently and sturdily over the knot, and had fed and conciliated the homeless one,—on that very same day, I repeat, he had not only wandered ecstatically off, while consuming green snow-apples in the Sampsons' driving-shed, into