mbling hands seemed
to be fighting something from his face. "Bushes," whispered Enoch Haver,
and then added, "Now he's climbing up the bank of the ravine." And we
saw the lean hands on the bed clutch up the wall, and then the voice
broke forth: "Me first--first up--get away from here, Dock--I said
first," and we could see his hands climbing an imaginary tree.

His face glowed with the excitement of his delirium as he climbed, and
then apparently catching his breath he rested before he called out: "I'm
comin' down, clear the track for old Dan Tucker," and from the
convulsive gripping of his hands and arms and the hysterical intake of
his breath we who had seen Joe Nevison dive from the top of the old
tree, from limb to limb to the bottom, knew what he was doing. His heart
was thumping audibly when he finished, and we tried to calm him. For a
while we all sat about him in silence--forgetting the walls that shut us
in, and living with him in the open, Slaves of the Magic Tree. Then one
by one we left and only George Kirwin stayed with the sick man.

Joe Nevison had lived a wicked life. He had been the friend and
companion of vile men and the women whom such men choose, and they had
lived lives such as we in our little town only read about--and do not
understand. Yet all that night Joe Nevison roamed through the woods by
the creek, a little child, and no word passed his lips that could have
brought a hint of the vicious life that his manhood had known.

In that long night, while George Kirwin sat by his dying friend,
listening to his babble, two men were in the genii's hands. They put off
their years as a garment. Together they ran over the roofs of buildings
on Main Street that have been torn down for thirty years; they played
in barns and corncribs burned down so long ago that their very site is
in doubt; they romped over prairies where now are elm-covered streets;
and they played with boys and girls who have lain forgotten in little
sunken graves for a quarter of a century, out on the hill; or they
called from the four winds of heaven playmates who left our town at a
time so remote that to the watcher by the bed it seemed ages ago. The
games they played were of another day than this. When Joe began crying
"Barbaree," he summoned a troop of ghosts, and the pack went scampering
through the spectre town in the starlight; and when that game had tired
him the voice began to chatter of "Slap-and-a-kick," and
"Foot-and-a-half