He was still so timid at the beginning of the wonderful journey that when the kind old gentleman who drove the stage stopped his horses at a point on the road where ripe red apples hung thickly on a tree, climbed the fence and returned with a capacious hat full of the fruit, he was chilled with horror at the crime.  He had been freely told what was thought of people, and what was done with them, who took things not their own.  Afraid to decline the two apples proffered by the robber, who resumed his seat and ate brazenly of his loot, the solitary passenger would still be no party to the outrage.  He presently dropped his own two apples over the back of the stage, and later, lacking the preacher’s courage, averred that he had eaten them—­and couldn’t eat another one, thank you.  He was not a little affected by the fine bravado with which the old man ate apple after apple along miles of the road, full in the gaze of passersby, to whom he nodded in open-faced greeting, as might an honest man; but he was disappointed that there was no quick dragging to a jail, nor smiting by the hand of God, which quite as often occurred, if his mother and the minister knew anything about such matters.  He decided that at least the elderly reprobate would wake up in the dark that very night and cry out in mortal agony under the realization of his sin.

And yet he, the unsullied, the fine theoretical moralist, was to return along that road a thief.  A thief of parts, of depraved daring.

“Gramper” and “Grammer” proved to be an incredibly old couple, brown and withered and gray of locks, shrunken in stature, slow and feeble in action, and even rather timid themselves in their greetings.  They made much of this grandchild, but they were diffident.  Slowly it came to his knowledge that he was set up as a creature to adore.  He enjoyed a blissful new sensation of being deferred to.  Thereafter he lorded it over them, speaking in confident tones and making wild demands of entertainment.  His mother had been right.  They were Beans and, therefore, not much.  He had brought his own silver napkin-ring and had meant to show them how wonderfully he folded and rolled his napkin after each meal.  But it seemed they possessed no napkins whatever.  Even his mother hadn’t thought anything so repulsive as that of these people.  He now boldly played the new game at table that his mother had frowned on.  This was to measure off your meat and potatoes into an equal number of “bites,” so that they would “come out even.”  If you were careful and counted right, the thing could be done every time.

And for the first time in all his years he asked for more pie.  Of course this was anarchy.  He knew well enough that one piece of pie is the heaven-allotted portion; that no one, even partly a Bunker, should crave beyond it; yet this fatuous old pair seemed to invite just that licentiousness, and they watched him with doting eyes while he swaggered through his second helping.