g games. It
was not so strange that holidaying boys should play games; the amazing
feature of the performance was that Peep O'Day, a man old enough to be
grandfather to any of them, played with them, being by turns an Indian
chief, a robber baron, and the driver of a stagecoach attacked by Wild
Western desperadoes.

When he returned to town at dusk, drawing his little red wagon behind
him, his new suit was rumpled into many wrinkles and marked by dust and
grass stains; his flame-colored tie was twisted under one ear; his new
straw hat was mashed quite out of shape; and in his eyes was a light
that sundry citizens, on meeting him, could only interpret for a spark
struck from inner fires of madness.

Days that came after this, on through the midsummer, were, with
variations, but repetitions of the day I have just described. Each
morning Peep O'Day would go to either the courthouse or Judge Priest's
home to turn over to the Judge the unopened mail which had been
delivered to him at Gafford's stables; then he would secure from the
Judge a loan of money against his inheritance. Generally the amount of
his daily borrowing was a dollar; rarely was it so much as two dollars;
and only once was it more than two dollars.

By nightfall the sum would have been expended upon perfectly useless and
absolutely childish devices. It might be that he would buy toy pistols
and paper caps for himself and his following of urchins; or that his
whim would lead him to expend all the money in tin flutes. In one case
the group he so incongruously headed would be for that one day a gang of
make-believe banditti; in another, they would constitute themselves a
fife-and-drum corps--with barreltops for the drums--and would march
through the streets, where scandalized adults stood in their tracks to
watch them go by, they all the while making weird sounds, which with
them passed for music.

Or again, the available cash resources would be invested in provender;
and then there would be an outing in the woods. Under Peep O'Day's
captaincy his chosen band of youngsters picked dewberries; they went
swimming together in Guthrie's Gravel Pit, out by the old Fair Grounds,
where his spare naked shanks contrasted strongly with their plump
freckled legs as all of them splashed through the shallows, making for
deep water. Under his leadership they stole watermelons from Mr. Dick
Bell's patch, afterward eating their spoils in thickets of grapevines
along the ba