ashed down his breast in little, spurting streams.

But the boy didn't look back. He ran all the way home and told his
mother he had seen a wild man on the road to the village; and later,
when his father came in from the fields, he was soundly thrashed for
letting the sight of a tramp make him lose a good tin bucket and half a
gallon of milk worth six cents a quart.

* * * * *

The rich, fresh milk put life into Mr. Trimm. He rested the better for
it during the early part of that night in a haw thicket. Only the
sharp, darting pains in his wrists kept rousing him to temporary
wakefulness. In one of those intervals of waking the plan that had been
sketchily forming in his mind from the time he had quit the clearing in
the woods took on a definite, fixed shape. But how was he with safety to
get the sort of aid he needed, and where?

Canvassing tentative plans in his head, he dozed off again.

* * * * *

On a smooth patch of turf behind the blacksmith shop three yokels were
languidly pitching horseshoes--"quaits" they called them--at a stake
driven in the earth. Just beyond, the woods shredded out into a long,
yellow and green peninsula which stretched up almost to the back door of
the smithy, so that late of afternoons the slanting shadows of the
near-most trees fell on its roof of warped shingles. At the extreme end
of this point of woods Mr. Trimm was squatted behind a big boulder,
squinting warily through a thick-fringed curtain of ripened goldenrod
tops and sumacs, heavy-headed with their dark-red tapers. He had been
there more than an hour, cautiously waiting his chance to hail the
blacksmith, whose figure he could make out in the smoky interior of his
shop, passing back and forth in front of a smudgy forge fire and
rattling metal against metal in intermittent fits of professional
activity.

From where Mr. Trimm watched to where the horseshoe-pitching game went
on was not more than sixty feet. He could hear what the players said and
even see the little puffs of dust rise when one of them clapped his
hands together after a pitch. He judged by the signs of slackening
interest that they would be stopping soon and, he hoped, going clear
away.

But the smith loafed out of his shop and, after an exchange of bucolic
banter with the three of them, he took a hand in their game himself. He
wore no coat or waistcoat and, as he poised a horseshoe for his firs