hought how a gambler at the State fair picked him out for a
greeny before he had fairly got through the gate, and wondered how the
gambler could have known he was so green without being told, and yet he
carried a sign of greenness, from the faded and sunburned hair of his
head to the sole of his stove-blacking shoes. He thought how the gambler
got him to bet that he could find the pea in the shell, and how he
had been so confident that he could find it that he had bet his whole
month's wages, and when the gambler had taken it, and wound it around a
wad he had, and put it in his vest pocket, he remembered, here sitting
on the porch with his rheumatic leg, how mad he was when the gambler who
had ruined him, shouted, "Next gentleman, now! Roll up, tumble up, any
way to get up!" As he sat there waiting for the boys to come back and
be company for him, he thought how destitute he was when the gambler had
taken his money, how he was twenty miles from home, with only 20 cents
in his pocket, and he sat down on a chicken coop, and ate 10 cents'
worth of the hardest-hearted pie that ever was, and the tears came to
his eyes, and the great crowd at the fair all mixed up with the
horses and cattle, and he wandered about like a crazy person, all the
afternoon, and at night started to walk home, with the balance of his
wealth invested in gingerbread that stuck in his throat as he walked
along the road in the dust, and he drank at all the wells he passed,
until before he got home the peaches he had eaten before he gambled,
combined with the corrugated iron pie, and the gingerbread and the
various waters, gave him a case of cholera morbus big enough for a grown
person, and when he got home along toward morning he wanted to die, and
rather thought he would. Then he began to wonder if that gambler ever
prospered, and whether he wound up his career in the penitentiary, or in
politics, when he saw a big dust down the road, where the boys had gone,
and presently the whole crowd came on a run, barefooted, and the first
to arrive hit Uncle Ike on the arm and said, "Tag; you're it," and
they all laid down on the grass and panted, and accused each other of
shoving, and not running fair. After they had got so they could breathe
easy, and each had taken a lot of green apples out of his shirt, and
were biting into them and looking sorry they did so, the red-headed boy
said:

"Uncle Ike, we have been talking it over, and have decided that some day
y