acutely with his ailment on a
warm May morning, one of those mornings when the lawless youths of the
village decided to play hooky in the afternoon and test the
temperature of the swimming-hole. On such a morning he was to be found
somewhere near the center of the school-room, this being the point
most remote from the distraction of open windows and hence selected
for him by the teacher. He was seated at a small desk whose top was
deeply scored by carven initials and monograms of rude design, all
inked in to give them the boldness of touch necessary when one would
have his art impress the beholder. An open book lay on that desk-top
but the eyes of the Individual were not focused on its pages.

He was gazing--aslant so that the teacher would not detect him at
it--through one of those remote open windows. And he was not seeing
the roofs of the little town or the alluring line of low wooded bluffs
across the river. He was seeing swarms of Indians mounted bare-back on
swift ponies.

Swarms and swarms of them, stripped to the waist, befeathered,
trousered in tightly fitting buckskin, they were defying all the laws
of gravitation by the manner in which every one clung by a single heel
to his mustang, allowing his body to droop alongside in a negligently
graceful attitude. These savages were circling round and round a
stage-coach. And on the top of that stage-coach, with his trusty rifle
at his shoulder--while the driver beside him died a painful
death,--sat the Individual himself. None other. And he was certainly
playing havoc with those redskins.

We need not undergo the weary ordeal of waiting with him while the
clock's slothful hands creep around the dial. We may skip the
interval--as he would do ever so gladly if he only could--and see him
that night as he climbs from his bedroom window, crawls down the
woodshed roof, and drops from the low eaves to make his way across the
vacant lot next door and thence--out West.

As far perhaps as the next town, which lies seven miles or so
away; where he is overhauled and ignominiously dragged back to
civilization.

That Individual--the only one of them all who did not attain the
consummation of his hopes, the only one who had to stay at home--is
the sole member of the foregoing list who acknowledged his true
motives. For he asserted loudly, and with lamentations, that the
spirit of adventure was blazing within him; he wanted to go out West
to fight Indians and desperadoes.