ders, and with a gleam of
fiendish exultation in his eye stealthily descended from his porch and
crossed to the hole in the hedge. No one was in sight except two
barefooted searchers after clams a few hundred yards farther up the
beach and a man working in a field half a mile away. The bay shimmered
in the broiling August sun and from a distant grove came the rattle and
wheeze of locusts. Throggs Neck blazed in silence, and utterly silent
was the house of Appleboy.

With an air of bravado, but with a slightly accelerated heartbeat,
Tunnygate thrust himself through the hole in the hedge and looked
scornfully about the Appleboy lawn. A fierce rage worked through his
veins. A lawn! What effrontery! What business had these condescending
second-raters to presume to improve a perfectly good beach which was
satisfactory to other folks? He'd show 'em! He took a step in the
direction of the transplanted sea grass. Unexpectedly the door of the
Appleboy kitchen opened.

"I warned you!" enunciated Mr. Appleboy with unnatural calmness, which
with another background might have struck almost anybody as suspicious.

"Huh!" returned the startled Tunnygate, forced under the circumstances
to assume a nonchalance that he did not altogether feel. "You!"

"Well," repeated Mr. Appleboy. "Don't ever say I didn't!"

"Pshaw!" ejaculated Mr. Tunnygate disdainfully.

With premeditation and deliberation, and with undeniable malice
aforethought, he kicked the nearest bunch of sea grass several feet in
the air. His violence carried his leg high in the air and he partially
lost his equilibrium. Simultaneously a white streak shot from beneath
the porch and something like a red-hot poker thrust itself savagely into
an extremely tender part of his anatomy.

"Ouch! O--o--oh!" he yelled in agony. "Oh!"

"Come here, Andrew!" said Mr. Appleboy mildly. "Good doggy! Come here!"

But Andrew paid no attention. He had firmly affixed himself to the base
of Mr. Tunnygate's personality without any intention of being
immediately detached. And he had selected that place, taken aim, and
discharged himself with an air of confidence and skill begotten of
lifelong experience.

"Oh! O--o--oh!" screamed Tunnygate, turning wildly and clawing through
the hedge, dragging Andrew after him. "Oh! O--oh!"

Mrs. Tunnygate rushed to the door in time to see her spouse lumbering up
the beach with a white object gyrating in the air behind him.

"What's the matter?" she ca