didn't care
what they said--even then; he registered his oath that it made no
difference what they did to him or what the others did, he would never
desert the Tree. He commanded all of us to come back; if not by day then
to gather in the moonlight and bring our chicken for the altar and our
eggs for the ceremony, and he promised that he would be there. We were
years and years in obeying Joe Nevison. Many of us have had long
journeys to go; and some of us lead little children by the hand as we
creep up the hollow, crawl through the gooseberry bushes, and 'coon the
log over the chasm to our meeting place. But we are nearly all there
now; and in the moonlight, when the corn seems to be waving over a wide
field, a tree springs up as by magic and we take our places again as of
old.

Many years have passed since Marshal Furgeson stood those seven Slaves
of the Magic Tree in line before the calaboose door and made them
surrender the feathered cork apple-stealers and the sacred chicken
hooks. In those years many terrors have ridden the boys who have gone
out into the world to fight its dragons and grapple with its gorgons;
but never have those boys felt any happiness so sweet as that which
rested on their hearts when they heard the Marshal say, "Now you boys
run on home--but mind you if I ever----" and he never did--except Joe
Nevison. Once it was for boring a hole in the depot platform and
tapping a barrel of cider; once it was for going through a window in the
Hustler hardware store and taking a box of pocketknives and two
revolvers, with which to reward his gang, and finally, when the boy was
in the midst of his teens, for breaking into the schoolhouse and burning
the books. Joe's father always bought him off, as fathers always can buy
boys off, when mothers go to the offended person and promise, and beg,
and weep. So Joe Nevison grew up the town bad boy--defiant of law,
reckless and unrestrained, with the blood of border ruffianism in his
veins and the scorn of God and man and the love of sin in his heart. The
week after he left town, and before he was twenty, his father paid for
"Red" Martin's grey race horse, which disappeared the night Joe's bed
was found empty. In those days the Nevisons had more money than most of
the people in our town, but as the years went by they began to lose
their property, and it was said that it went in great slices to Joe, to
keep him out of the penitentiary.

We knew that Joe Nevison was i