raight at the boy.

"I don't pretend to know what I don't know, but I'll bet a million
billion dollars there is something else besides just all this war stuff.
I can't tell it, I just feel it. Anyhow, I'm to stay here with Aunty
Boone till you come back. Girls can be trusted anywhere, but it may take
the whole Army of the West, yet, to follow up and look after two little
runty boys. And let me tell _you_ something, Bev, something I heard
Aunty Boone say this morning." She said: "Taint goin' to be more 'n a
minnit now till them boys grows up an' grows together, same size, same
age. They been little and big, long as they goin' to be. Now you know
what you're coming to."

Mat was digging in the ground with a stick, and she flipped a clod at
Beverly with the last words. Both of us had once expected to marry her
when we grew up, unless Jondo should carry her away as his bride before
that time. He was a dozen years older than Mat, who was only fourteen
and small for her age. A flush always came to her cheeks when we talked
of Jondo in that way. We didn't know why.

We sat silent for a little while. A vague sense of desolateness, of the
turning-places of life, as real to children as to older folk, seemed to
press suddenly down upon all three of us. Ours was not the ordinary
child-life even of that day. And that was a time when children had no
world of their own as they have to-day. Whatever developed men and women
became a part of the younger life training as well. And while we were
ignorant of much that many children then learned early, for we had lived
mostly beside the fort on the edge of the wilderness, we were alert, and
self-dependent, fearless and far-seeing. We could use tools readily: we
could build fires and prepare game for cooking; we could climb trees,
set traps, swim in the creek, and ride horses. Moreover, we were bound
to one another by the force of isolation and need for playmates. Our
imagination supplied much that our surroundings denied us. So we felt
more deeply, maybe, than many city-bred children who would have paled
with fear at dangers that we only laughed over.

No ripple in the even tenor of our days, however, had given any hint of
the coming of this sudden tense oppression on our young souls, and we
were stunned by what we could neither express nor understand.

"Whatever comes or doesn't come," Beverly said at last, stretching
himself at full length, stomach downward, on the bare ground, "whatev