d to escape these, as many foolish persons
do among civilized nations, and they thought if they could only escape
them they would be happy; they did not know that they would be merely
savage, and that the great difference between a savage and a civilized
man is work. They would all have been willing to follow these Indians
away into the far West, where they were going, and be barbarians for the
rest of their days; and the wonder is that some of the fellows did not
try it. After the red men had flitted away like red leaves their memory
remained with the boys, and a plague of bows and arrows raged among
them, and it was a good while before they calmed down to their old
desire of having a gun.

But they came back to that at last, for that was the normal desire of
every boy in the Boy's Town who was not a girl-boy, and there were
mighty few girl-boys there. Up to a certain point, a pistol would do,
especially if you had bullet-moulds, and could run bullets to shoot out
of it; only your mother would be sure to see you running them, and just
as likely as not would be so scared that she would say you must not
shoot bullets. Then you would have to use buckshot, if you could get
them anywhere near the right size, or small marbles; but a pistol was
always a makeshift, and you never could hit anything with it, not even a
board fence; it always kicked, or burst, or something. Very few boys
ever came to have a gun, though they all expected to have one. But seven
or eight boys would go hunting with one shot-gun, and take turn-about
shooting; some of the little fellows never got to shoot at all, but they
could run and see whether the big boys had hit anything when they fired,
and that was something. This was my boy's privilege for a long time
before he had a gun of his own, and he went patiently with his elder
brother, and never expected to fire the gun, except, perhaps, to shoot
the load off before they got back to town; they were not allowed to
bring the gun home loaded. It was a gun that was pretty safe for
anything in front of it, but you never could tell what it was going to
do. It began by being simply an old gun-barrel, which my boy's brother
bought of another boy who was sick of it for a fip, as the half-real
piece was called, and it went on till it got a lock from one gunsmith
and a stock from another, and was a complete gun. But this took time;
perhaps a month; for the gunsmiths would only work at it in their
leisure; they w