Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/56

 a second and longer look at Lonely O'Malley, as he prowls so moodily about between those imprisoning home fences.

Beyond a trick of nervously hunching up one shoulder, of wriggling his body when talking, and squinting at people, especially his elders, he is, after all, only a good deal of the every-day, ubiquitous, dream-weaving, nondescript and much misunderstood creature known as Boy. It was only in the merest accidentals, such as being powder-marked on the right cheek-bone, that he differed from others of his kind.

The first thing one would be sure to notice about Lonely was a nebulous cloud of freckles, as brown as the spots on a turkey egg, bridging his rather crooked little nose. His thin young face was always hungry-looking, wearing obviously the hunger of the soul and not that of the body, since Lonely, even after his seventh apple turn-over, still bore his wistful look of want. His hair was a dingy reddish-brown, thick and matted, sprouting waywardly up through the rents in his tattered old skull-cap, giving every evidence of that time-honored home-treatment, demanding only a bowl and