Of course we knew that Joe would be the first one back; he didn't care what they said--even then; he registered his oath that it made no difference what they did to him or what the others did, he would never desert the Tree. He commanded all of us to come back; if not by day then to gather in the moonlight and bring our chicken for the altar and our eggs for the ceremony, and he promised that he would be there. We were years and years in obeying Joe Nevison. Many of us have had long journeys to go; and some of us lead little children by the hand as we creep up the hollow, crawl through the gooseberry bushes, and 'coon the log over the chasm to our meeting place. But we are nearly all there now; and in the moonlight, when the corn seems to be waving over a wide field, a tree springs up as by magic and we take our places again as of old.
Many years have passed since Marshal Furgeson stood those seven Slaves of the Magic Tree in line before the calaboose door and made them surrender the feathered cork apple-stealers and the sacred chicken hooks. In those years many terrors have ridden the boys who have gone out into the world to fight its dragons and grapple with its gorgons; but never have those boys felt any happiness so sweet as that which rested on their hearts when they heard the Marshal say, "Now you boys run on home--but mind you if I ever----" and he never did--except Joe Nevison. Once it was for boring a hole in the depot platform and tapping a barrel of cider; once it was for going through a window in the Hustler hardware store and taking a box of pocketknives and two revolvers, with which to reward his gang, and finally, when the boy was in the midst of his teens, for breaking into the schoolhouse and burning the books. Joe's father always bought him off, as fathers always can buy boys off, when mothers go to the offended person and promise, and beg, and weep. So Joe Nevison grew up the town bad boy--defiant of law, reckless and unrestrained, with the blood of border ruffianism in his veins and the scorn of God and man and the love of sin in his heart. The week after he left town, and before he was twenty, his father paid for "Red" Martin's grey race horse, which disappeared the night Joe's bed was found empty. In those days the Nevisons had more money than most of the people in our town, but as the years went by they began to lose their property, and it was said that it went in great slices to Joe, to keep him out of the penitentiary.