The young justice of the peace was right. At least so far as Jimmie
Sniffen was concerned, the words of the war prophet had filled one mind
with unrest. In the past Jimmie's idea of a holiday had been to spend it
scouting in the woods. In this pleasure he was selfish. He did not want
companions who talked, and trampled upon the dead leaves so that they
frightened the wild animals and gave the Indians warning. Jimmie liked
to pretend. He liked to fill the woods with wary and hostile
adversaries. It was a game of his own inventing. If he crept to the top
of a hill and, on peering over it, surprised a fat woodchuck, he
pretended the woodchuck was a bear, weighing two hundred pounds; if,
himself unobserved, he could lie and watch, off its guard, a rabbit,
squirrel, or, most difficult of all, a crow, it became a deer and that
night at supper Jimmie made believe he was eating venison. Sometimes he
was a scout of the Continental Army and carried despatches to General
Washington. The rules of that game were that if any man ploughing in the
fields, or cutting trees in the woods, or even approaching along the
same road, saw Jimmie before Jimmie saw him, Jimmie was taken prisoner,
and before sunrise was shot as a spy. He was seldom shot. Or else why on
his sleeve was the badge for "stalking"? But always to have to make
believe became monotonous. Even "dry shopping" along the Rue de la Paix,
when you pretend you can have anything you see in any window, leaves one
just as rich, but unsatisfied. So the advice of the war correspondent to
seek out German spies came to Jimmie like a day at the circus, like a
week at the Danbury Fair. It not only was a call to arms, to protect his
flag and home, but a chance to play in earnest the game in which he most
delighted. No longer need he pretend. No longer need he waste his
energies in watching, unobserved, a greedy rabbit rob a carrot field.
The game now was his fellow-man and his enemy; not only his enemy, but
the enemy of his country.

In his first effort Jimmie was not entirely successful. The man looked
the part perfectly; he wore an auburn beard, disguising spectacles, and
he carried a suspicious knapsack. But he turned out to be a professor
from the Museum of Natural History, who wanted to dig for Indian
arrow-heads. And when Jimmie threatened to arrest him, the indignant
gentleman arrested Jimmie. Jimmie escaped only by leading the professor
to a secret cave of his own, though on some