The boy looked up and laughed.

“It wasn’t,” he said with utter truth.  “You told me I could do it and I—­I just did.”

“I knew you could do it!” said Brian with the vigor of confidence that had made the boy his slave.  “Still, when you unleashed that first roar and the crowd began to collect, I confess I thought you’d busted something vital and were yelling for help.”

Don glanced at this clothes.  The summer show had freed him from the mended rags he hated.  Shirt and trousers, hat and shoes were as near like Brian’s as they could be.  So was the coat upon his arm and the knapsack on his back.

“Whenever you tell me I can do a thing,” he said, “and hang around to see me do it, I can always somehow seem to make myself do it.  Look!” he broke off with a boyish grin, pointing at a farmhouse on a distant hill.  “There’s the farm where you threw the can of whitewash at the farmer when he swore at his wife for dropping the eggs and threatened to lick her.  Wasn’t he a sight!”

“He was!” admitted Brian.  “And wasn’t he mad?  If he hadn’t been a coward he would have licked me instead.  As it was, I never fully understood why his wife shied an egg at me.  However, that’s all rather a shady part of my past.  I’m not reminding you of the self-winding blunderbuss you got in part payment for chopping wood, am I?  Or that it went off by itself and shot a cabbage?”

Laughing they struck off into a twilight stretch of woods, found a familiar clearing near a spring and made a fire.

“Well,” said Brian when the fire was down to embers, “what’s the schedule?  You’re road manager this week.  What do we eat?”

“Sausages,” said Donald, unloading his pockets.  “A can of macaroni and an apple pie.”

“You disgraceful kid!” exclaimed Brian.  “Whenever you get into a country store without a guard you kick over the traces and appear with something in your pocket that busts a road rule and obligates me to a sermon when I hate ’em.  Pie, my son, is effete and civilized.  It’s like feeding cream puffs to a wandering Arab.  You’re apt to make him stop his Arabing and hang around the spot where the cream puff grows.  However, now that you’ve brought the thing into camp, it would be improvident not to eat it.  What am I, Don, wood-scout or cook?”

“Cook,” said Donald.  “All day,” he added, “you’ve been limping.”

Brian made a fence of forked twigs, hung the sausages up to toast, opened the can of macaroni and set it in the embers.  That Don had noticed the limp gratified him immensely, even though it had been a mere and prosaic matter of a blistered heel.