"The cut on his head didn't make him crazy," said her companion,
murmuringly. "Of course it wasn't that, or he would have been raving
when he came down from the mountain. Something happened to him
afterward."

"Yes, there did," Johnnie assented wonderingly--falteringly. "I don't
know how you came to guess it, but the woman who told me that she was
hiding in the front room when they were quarrelling and saw Uncle Pros
fall down the steps, says he landed almost square on his head. She
thought at first his neck was broken--that he was killed."

"Uh-huh," nodded the newcomer. "You see I'm a good guesser. I make my
living guessing things." He flung her a whimsical, sidelong glance, as,
having finished their lunch, they rose and moved on. "I wish I had my
hands on the processes of that atlas vertebra," he said.

"On--on what?" inquired Johnnie in a slightly startled tone.

"Never mind, sis'. If we find him, and I can handle him, I'll know where
to look."

"Nobody can touch him but me when he gets out this way," Johnnie said.
"He acts sort of scared and sort of fierce, and just runs and hides from
people. Maybe if you'll tell me what you want done, I could do it."

"Maybe you could--and then again maybe you couldn't," returned the
other, with a great show of giving her proposition serious
consideration. "A good many folks think they can do just what I can--if
I'd only tell 'em how--and sometimes they find out they can't."

Upon the word, they topped a little rise, and Johnnie laid a swift,
detaining hand upon her companion's arm. At the roadside, in a little
open, grassy space where once evidently a cabin had stood, knelt the
figure of a gaunt old man. At first he seemed to the approaching pair to
be gesticulating and pointing, but a moment's observation gave them the
gleam of a knife in his hand--he was playing mumblety-peg. As they
stood, drawn back near some roadside bushes, watching him, the long,
lean old arm went up, the knife flashing against the knuckles of the
clenched fist and, with a whirl of the wrist, reversing swiftly in air,
to bury its blade in the soil before the player.

"Hi! Hi! Hi! I th'owed it. That counts two for me," the cracked old
falsetto shrilled out.

There on that grassy plot that might have been a familiar dooryard of
his early days, he was playing alone, gone back to childhood. Johnnie
gazed and her eyes swam with unshed tears.

"You better not go up there--and him with the knife an