It looks like--I thought for a
minute--' The small flame shot out of the gloom, flickered, then
burned with a steady glow. Bill stooped, bending over something on
the ground. The match burned down.
Bill's voice came out of the darkness:
'I say, you were right about that noise. It was a shot. The poor
little chap's down there on the floor with a hole in him the size
of my fist.'
17
Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man
should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in
middle life it is apt to be serious. Dudley Pickering had escaped
boyhood at the time when his contemporaries were contracting it.
It is true that for a few years after leaving the cradle he had
exhibited a certain immatureness, but as soon as he put on
knickerbockers and began to go about a little he outgrew all that.
He avoided altogether the chaotic period which usually lies
between the years of ten and fourteen. At ten he was a thoughtful
and sober-minded young man, at fourteen almost an old fogy.
And now--thirty-odd years overdue--boyhood had come upon him. As
he examined the revolver in his bedroom, wild and unfamiliar
emotions seethed within him. He did not realize it, but they were
the emotions which should have come to him thirty years before and
driven him out to hunt Indians in the garden.
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