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 and was always being kept in
for reading detective stories behind his desk. There was Tip Smith,
destined by his freckles and red hair to be the buffoon in all our
games, though he walked like a timid little old man and had a funny,
cracked laugh. Tip worked hard in his father's grocery store every
afternoon, and swept it out before school in the morning. Even his
recreations were laborious. He collected cigarette cards and tin
tobacco-tags indefatigably, and would sit for hours humped up over a
snarling little scroll-saw which he kept in his attic. His dearest
possessions were some little pill-bottles that purported to contain
grains of wheat from the Holy Land, water from the Jordan and the
Dead Sea, and earth from the Mount of Olives. His father had bought
these dull things from a Baptist missionary who peddled them, and
Tip seemed to derive great satisfaction from their remote origin.

The tall boy was Arthur Adams. He had fine hazel eyes that were
almost too reflective and sympathetic for a boy, and such a pleasant
voice that we all loved to hear him read aloud. Even when he had to
read poetry aloud at school, no one ever thought of laughing. To be
sure, he was not at school very much of the time. He was seventeen
and should have finished the High School the year before, but he was
always off somewhere with his gun. Arthur's mother was dead, and his
father, who was feverishly absorbed in promoting schemes, wanted to
send the boy away to school and get him off his hands; but Arthur
always begged off for another year and promised to study. I remember
him as a tall, brown boy with an intelligent face, always lounging
among a lot of us little fellows, laughing at us oftener than with
us, but such a soft, satisfied laugh that we felt rather flattered
when we provoked it. In after-years people said that Arthur had been
given to evil ways even as a lad, and it is true