"Don," said Brian one twilight as they swung along in the dust of a
country road, "if I'm not mistaken back yonder is the field where you
barked for a summer show. Man alive," he added with a laugh, "how you
did bark! Now with a summerful of health in your system and your voice
full of fresh air, I could understand it, but then! Honestly, old top,
I didn't know it was in you!"

The boy looked up and laughed.

"It wasn't," he said with utter truth. "You told me I could do it and
I--I just did."

"I knew you could do it!" said Brian with the vigor of confidence that
had made the boy his slave. "Still, when you unleashed that first roar
and the crowd began to collect, I confess I thought you'd busted
something vital and were yelling for help."

Don glanced at this clothes. The summer show had freed him from the
mended rags he hated. Shirt and trousers, hat and shoes were as near
like Brian's as they could be. So was the coat upon his arm and the
knapsack on his back.

"Whenever you tell me I can do a thing," he said, "and hang around to
see me do it, I can always somehow seem to make myself do it. Look!"
he broke off with a boyish grin, pointing at a farmhouse on a distant
hill. "There's the farm where you threw the can of whitewash at the
farmer when he swore at his wife for dropping the eggs and threatened
to lick her. Wasn't he a sight!"

"He was!" admitted Brian. "And wasn't he mad? If he hadn't been a
coward he would have licked me instead. As it was, I never fully
understood why his wife shied an egg at me. However, that's all rather
a shady part of my past. I'm not reminding you of the self-winding
blunderbuss you got in part payment for chopping wood, am I? Or that
it went off by itself and shot a cabbage?"

Laughing they struck off into a twilight stretch of woods, found a
familiar clearing near a spring and made a fire.

"Well," said Brian when the fire was down to embers, "what's the
schedule? You're road manager this week. What do we eat?"

"Sausages," said Donald, unloading his pockets. "A can of macaroni and
an apple pie."

"You disgraceful kid!" exclaimed Brian. "Whenever you get into a
country store without a guard you kick over the traces and appear with
something in your pocket that busts a road rule and obligates me to a
sermon when I hate 'em. Pie, my son, is effete and civilized. It's
like feeding cream puffs to a wandering Arab. You're apt to make him
stop his Ar