Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/58

 ladies had let their gaze fall a little lower and studied Lonely's most significant and eloquent members, his sinewy and scrawny young legs, they might have hesitated for a moment or two. For those gently concave, bandy legs of Lonely's veritably seemed built for shinning up apple-trees, for scaling orchard fences, for worming under wood-sheds and careering through melon-patches, for that airy "frog-motion" which is the pride of all youthful swimmers, and, finally, for the general destruction of those garments which are the despair of all experienced mothers.

His gnarled and crooked little fingers, too, were equally expressive, cut and scarred and marked as they were, embellished with a supply of warts which had so far defied every art of conjuration, every spell and incantation for their removal, from burying beefsteak under a full moon to assiduous anointment with "witch-oil."

When idle, Lonely had the habit of twitching these fingers restlessly (nervous women he could always put to rout by merely working his double-jointed thumbs). Likewise, he had the somewhat irritating habit of knocking his