ard a
shadowy corner. "He found his work out in the world, and then he had to
stop and couldn't do it. Poor Mr. Jack!"

CHAPTER XIII

A SURPRISE FOR MR. JACK

Life at the Holly farmhouse was not what it had been. The coming of
David had introduced new elements that promised complications. Not
because he was another mouth to feed--Simeon Holly was not worrying
about that part any longer. Crops showed good promise, and all ready in
the bank even now was the necessary money to cover the dreaded note,
due the last of August. The complicating elements in regard to David
were of quite another nature.

To Simeon Holly the boy was a riddle to be sternly solved. To Ellen
Holly he was an everpresent reminder of the little boy of long ago, and
as such was to be loved and trained into a semblance of what that boy
might have become. To Perry Larson, David was the "derndest
checkerboard of sense an' nonsense goin'"--a game over which to chuckle.

At the Holly farmhouse they could not understand a boy who would leave
a supper for a sunset, or who preferred a book to a toy pistol--as
Perry Larson found out was the case on the Fourth of July; who picked
flowers, like a girl, for the table, yet who unhesitatingly struck the
first blow in a fight with six antagonists: who would not go fishing
because the fishes would not like it, nor hunting for any sort of wild
thing that had life; who hung entranced for an hour over the "millions
of lovely striped bugs" in a field of early potatoes, and who promptly
and stubbornly refused to sprinkle those same "lovely bugs" with Paris
green when discovered at his worship. All this was most perplexing, to
say the least.

Yet David worked, and worked well, and in most cases he obeyed orders
willingly. He learned much, too, that was interesting and profitable;
nor was he the only one that made strange discoveries during those July
days. The Hollys themselves learned much. They learned that the rose of
sunset and the gold of sunrise were worth looking at; and that the
massing of the thunderheads in the west meant more than just a shower.
They learned, too, that the green of the hilltop and of the
far-reaching meadow was more than grass, and that the purple haze along
the horizon was more than the mountains that lay between them and the
next State. They were beginning to see the world with David's eyes.

There were, too, the long twilights and evenings when David, on the
wings of his violin, wo