"Gee!" breathed Bobby. "He sure enough can't talk, can he?"
"No," returned the Interpreter. "Poor Billy has never spoken a word."
"Gee!" said Bobby again. "An' can't he hear nothin,' neither?"
Too awe-stricken even to repeat his favorite exclamation, the boy munched his cooky in silence, while Maggie, enjoying her share of the old basket maker's hospitality, snuggled a little closer to the wheel of the big chair.
"Billy Rand, you see," explained the Interpreter, "is my legs."
"Yes," agreed the Interpreter, "but very good legs just the same. Billy runs all sorts of errands for me--goes to town to sell our baskets and to bring home our groceries, helps about the house and does many things that I can't do. He is hoeing the garden this afternoon. He comes in every once in a while to ask if I want anything. He sleeps in a little room next to mine and sometimes in the night, when I am not resting well, I hear him come to my bedside to see if I am all right."
"An' yer keep him an' take care of him?" asked Bobby.
"Yes," returned the Interpreter, "I take care of Billy and Billy takes care of me. He has fine legs but not much of a--but cannot speak or hear. I can talk and hear and think but have no legs. So with my reasonably good head and his very good legs we make a fairly good man, you see."
Bobby laughed aloud and even wee Maggie chuckled at the Interpreter's quaint explanation of himself and Billy Rand.
"Yes," agreed the Interpreter, "but most of us men are funny in one way or another--aren't we, Maggie?" He looked down into the upturned face of that tiny wisp of humanity at his side.
Very confident now in his superiority over the Interpreter, whose deaf and dumb legs were safely out of sight in the garden back of the house, Bobby finished the last of his cookies, and began to explore. Accompanying his investigations with a running fire of questions, he fingered the unfinished basket and the tools and material on the table, examined the wheel chair, and went from end to end of the balcony porch. Hanging over the railing, he looked down from every possible angle upon the rocks, the stairway and the dusty road below. Exhausting, at last, the possibilities of the immediate vicinity, he turned his inquiring gaze upon the more distant landscape.