Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/54

 own house he found the woman of the pink sunbonnet marooned on the box of her chain-pump, with Gilead keeping guard below, doggedly. He had been attacked with a kettleful of hot water; but the engagement had been a brief one.

It was only after exacting a promise that nothing more should be said of the black raspberry bushes, that Lonely dragged Gilead away; and, having made a bird-snare into which even the Chamboro sparrows resentfully declined to poke their heads, he once more loitered ill at ease about his own yard, a bitter and rebellious young Ishmaelite, seeing that Alaska Alice did not fall out of her cart, and making sure that the omnivorous Plato did not extend his browsing exercises to the family furniture. He was still brooding about the way in which he had been received in Chamboro, where not an advance had been made to him, and not a subject had paid fealty to him. And he could have told them more about shiners and mud-cat and sunfish than could all the village Solomons put together. He, the one-time boy king of Cowansburg, could have shown them how to