“Custer,” said his father, in a timidly propitiatory tone, “I hope you ain’t feeling stuck-up about this!”

“I wish it had never happened!” The boy spoke in an angry whisper.

“You wish what had never happened, Custer?”

“About you—­I mean!”

Shrimplin gave a hollow little laugh.

“Well, and what about me, son—­if I may be allowed to ask?”

“I wish you’d gone down to the crick bank like I wanted you to!” rejoined the boy.

Again he felt the hot tears gather, and drew the back of his hand across his eyes.  The little lamplighter had been wishing this, too; indeed, it would for ever remain one of the griefs of his life that he had not done so.  He wondered miserably if the old faith would ever renew itself.  His portion in life was the deadly commonplace, but Custer’s belief had given him hours of high fellowship with heroes and warriors; it had also ministered to the bloody-mindedness which lay somewhere back of that quaking fear constitutional with him, and which he could no more control than he could control his hunger or thirst.  His blinking eyelids loosed a solitary drop of moisture that slid out to the tip of his hooked nose.  But though Mr. Shrimplin’s physical equipment was of the slightest for the role in life he would have essayed, nature, which gives the hunted bird and beast feather and fur to blend with the russets and browns of the forest and plain, had not dealt ungenerously with him, since he could believe that a lie long persisted in gathered to itself the very soul and substance of truth.  Another hollow little laugh escaped him.

“Lord, Custer, I was foolin’—­I am always foolin’!  It was my chance to see the stuff that’s in you.  Well, it’s pretty good stuff!” he added artfully.

But Custer was not ready for the reception of this new idea; his father’s display of cowardice had seemed only too real to him.  Yet the little lamplighter’s manner took on confidence as he prepared to establish a few facts as a working basis for their subsequent reconciliation.

“I’d been a little better pleased, son, if you’d gone quicker when you heard them calls Mr. Langham was letting out; you did hang back, you’ll remember—­it looked like you was depending on me too much; but I got no desire to rub this in.  What you done was nervy, and what I might have looked for with the bringing-up I’ve given you.  I shan’t mention that you hung back.”  He shot a glance out of the corners of his bleached blue eyes in Custer’s direction.  “How many minutes do you suppose you was in getting out of the cart and over the fence?  Not more than five, I’d say, and all that time I was sitting there shaking with laughter—­just shaking with inward laughter; I asked you not to leave me alone!  Well, I always was a joker but I consider that my best joke!”

Custer maintained a stony silence, yet he would have given anything could he have accepted those pleasant fictions his father was seeking to establish in the very habiliments of truth.