; the little willow seedlings emerged triumphantly from the
yellow froth, broke into spring leaf, shot up into summer growth, and
with their mesh of roots bound together the moist sand beneath them
against the batterings of another April. Here and there a cottonwood
soon glittered among them, quivering in the low current of air that,
even on breathless days when the dust hung like smoke above the wagon
road, trembled along the face of the water.

It was on such an island, in the third summer of its yellow green, that
we built our watch fire; not in the thicket of dancing willow wands, but
on the level terrace of fine sand which had been added that spring;
a little new bit of world, beautifully ridged with ripple marks, and
strewn with the tiny skeletons of turtles and fish, all as white and dry
as if they had been expertly cured. We had been careful not to mar the
freshness of the place, although we often swam to it on summer evenings
and lay on the sand to rest.

This was our last watch fire of the year, and there were reasons why I
should remember it better than any of the others. Next week the other
boys were to file back to their old places in the Sandtown High School,
but I was to go up to the Divide to teach my first country school in the
Norwegian district. I was already homesick at the thought of quitting
the boys with whom I had always played; of leaving the river, and going
up into a windy plain that was all windmills and cornfields and
big pastures; where there was nothing wilful or unmanageable in the
landscape, no new islands, and no chance of unfamiliar birds--such as
often followed the watercourses.

Other boys came and went and used the river for fishing or skating,
but we six were sworn to the spirit of the stream, and we were friends
mainly because of the river. There were the two Hassler boys, Fritz and
Otto, sons of the little German tailor. They were the youngest of us;
ragged boys of ten and twelve, with sunburned hair, weather-stained
faces, and pale blue eyes. Otto, the elder, was the best mathematician
in school, and clever at his books, but he always dropped out in the
spring term as if the river could not get on without him. He and Fritz
caught the fat, horned catfish and sold them about the town, and they
lived so much in the water that they were as brown and sandy as the
river itself.

There was Percy Pound, a fat, freckled boy with chubby cheeks, who took
half a dozen boys' story-papers