I had to take
from 'Lige for an old bill, but I kalkilate that's all I'll ever see of
it."

Rain fell again as the darkness gathered, but he still loitered on the
road and the sloping path of the garden, filled with a half resentful
sense of wrong, and hugging with gloomy pride an increasing sense of
loneliness and of getting dangerously wet. The swollen creek still
whispered, murmured and swirled beside the bank. At another time he
might have had wild ideas of emulating the surveyors on some extempore
raft and so escaping his present dreary home existence; but since the
disappearance of 'Lige, who had always excited an odd boyish antipathy
in his heart, although he had never seen him, he shunned the stream
contaminated with the missing man's unheroic fate. Presently the light
from the open window of the sitting-room glittered on the wet leaves
and sprays where he stood, and the voices of the family conclave came
fitfully to his ear. They didn't want him there. They had never thought
of asking him to come in. Well!--who cared? And he wasn't going to be
bought off with a candle and a seat by the kitchen fire. No!

Nevertheless he was getting wet to no purpose. There was the tool-house
and carpenter's shed near the bank; its floor was thickly covered with
sawdust and pine-wood shavings, and there was a mouldy buffalo skin
which he had once transported thither from the old wagon-bed. There,
too, was his secret cache of a candle in a bottle, buried with other
piratical treasures in the presence of the youthful Peters, who
consented to be sacrificed on the spot in buccaneering fashion to
complete the unhallowed rites. He unearthed the candle, lit it, and
clearing away a part of the shavings stood it up on the floor. He then
brought a prized, battered, and coverless volume from a hidden recess in
the rafters, and lying down with the buffalo robe over him, and his cap
in his hand ready to extinguish the light at the first footstep of a
trespasser, gave himself up--as he had given himself up, I fear, many
other times--to the enchantment of the page before him.

The current whispered, murmured, and sang, unheeded at his side. The
voices of his mother and sisters, raised at times in eagerness or
expectation of the future, fell upon his unlistening ears. For with the
spell that had come upon him, the mean walls of his hiding-place
melted away; the vulgar stream beside him might have been that dim,
subterraneous river down whic