“Why, Bob, where have you been?” his mother demanded. “Why, I never saw so many scratches!”
“I’ve been hunting,” he replied briefly. “They don’t hurt anyhow.”
Then he relapsed into absorbed silence. His mother, putting cream on his cereal, placed an experienced hand on his forehead. “Are you sure you feel well, dear?” she asked. “I think your head is a little hot.”
She was wisely silent, but she ran over in her mind the spring treatment for children at home. The blood, she felt, should be thinned after a winter of sausages and rich cocoa. She mentally searched her medicine case.
A strange thing happened that day. A broken plate disappeared from the upper shelf of a closet, where Pepy had hidden it; also a cup with a nick in it, similarly concealed; also the heel of a loaf of bread. Nor was that the end. For three days a sort of magic reigned in Pepy’s kitchen. Ten potatoes, laid out to peel, became eight. Matches and two ends of candle walked out, as it were, on their own feet. A tin pan with a hole in it left the kitchen-table and was discovered hiding in Bobby’s bureau, when the Fraulein put away the washing.
On the third day Mrs. Thorpe took her husband into their room and closed the door.
“Bob,” she said, “I don’t want to alarm you. But there is something wrong with Bobby.”
“I don’t know.” Her voice was worried. “He’s not a bit like himself. He is always away, for one thing. And he hardly eats at all.”
“And he comes home covered with mud. I have never seen his clothes in such condition. And last night, when he was bathing, I went into the bathroom. He is covered with scratches.”
“Now see here, mother,” the hunter’s father protested, “you’re the parent of a son, a perfectly hardy, healthy, and normal youngster, with an imagination. Probably he’s hunting Indians. I saw him in the Park yesterday with his air-rifle. Any how, just stop worrying and let him alone. A scratch or two won’t hurt him. And as to his not eating,--well, if he’s not eating at home he’s getting food somewhere, I’ll bet you a hat.”
So Bobby was undisturbed, save that the governess protested that he heard nothing she told him, and was absent-minded at his lessons. But as she was always protesting about something, no one paid any attention. Bobby drew ahead on his pocket allowance without question, and as his birthday was not far off, asked for “the dollar to grow on” in advance. He always received a dollar for each year, which went into the bank, and a dollar to grow on, which was his own to spend.