her!"

"Who's silly?" Johnnie had demanded, defensive, and blushing furiously.

"Grandpa's tickled to have her," Cis had continued.

There the matter was dropped. Nevertheless, Johnnie had then formed a
certain firm conviction, which he continued to hold. It was that Cis was
lacking in loyalty to the old doll (forgetting that only recently he had
hurled Letitia headfirst into the tiny room).

By the end of March Johnnie had begun to fret about One-Eye. He missed
the cowboy sadly; and what made the latter's absence seem all the harder
to bear was the belief that his friend was back in New York again, yet
was not visiting the flat because he was, for some reason, displeased.
With Cis?--about that new doll--or what?

"He's mad about somethin',"--Johnnie vowed it over and over. "He said
he'd be gone a few days. But that was _months_ ago."

Cis denied that she had anything to do with One-Eye's staying away. She
missed him, too; or, rather, she felt the loss of those almost nightly
gifts of fruit and sweets. As for Barber, he had no more good cigars to
smoke before his fellow longshoremen. And his lunch pail lacked oranges
and bananas at noontime, and had to be filled with prunes. Altogether,
the cowboy's failure to return worked a general hardship.

"Oh, why don't he write me again?" mourned Johnnie. These days he
secretly enjoyed any glimpse of Edwarda, and would even steal into Cis's
room sometimes to peep at her. She made him feel sure that One-Eye had
really once been there with them--as did also the letter and the blue
handkerchief.

Johnnie lightened his heart with all this testimony. For it was often
difficult for him to feel any more certain about the cowboy than he did
about his four millionaires, or Sir Galahad, say, or Uncas, or Goliath,
or Crusoe. He could revel gloriously in make-believe, yes; but perhaps
for this very reason he found himself terribly prone to doubt facts! And
as each day went by, he came to wonder more and more about the reality
of One-Eye, though the passing time as steadily added romantic touches
to the figure of the Westerner.

Often at night Johnnie held long conversations with him, confessing how
much he missed him, thanking him for past favors, begging him to return.
"Oh, One-Eye, _are_ y' mad at me?" he would implore. And if there were
stars framed by the window, they would dance as the gray eyes swam.

Whenever he roved hither and thither, hunting for boxes, he was really
hun