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Page 74
"Now, if I could get a couple of coyotes and a badger and a fox or two,"
he remarked, "I'd be fixed."
Mary, who was sorting over a pile of old boards back of the woodshed,
paused in alarm.
"It strikes me, young man," she said, a trifle sarcastically, "that the
more some people get the more they want. Your wishes seem to be on the
Jack's Bean-stalk scale. They grow to reach the sky in a single night.
Suppose you did have those things, you wouldn't be satisfied. It would
be a zebra and a giraffe and a jungle tiger next."
"No, it wouldn't," he declared. "I wouldn't know how to take care of
them, but I do know how to feed the things that live around here."
"What do you want them for?"
"Well, you know what Huldah said about summer campers. There's always a
lot of boys along, and if I had a sort of menagerie they'd want to come
over and play circus, and then they'd let me in on their ball-games and
things. It's awful lonesome with school out and Billy Downs gone back
East. There's so few fellows here my age, and Jack won't let me play
much with the little Mexicans. They aren't much fun anyhow when I can't
talk their lingo."
Mary straightened up, hammer in hand, and squinted her eyes
thoughtfully, a way she had when something puzzled her. It had not
occurred to her that Norman had social longings like her own which
Lone-Rock failed to satisfy. He watched her anxiously. That preoccupied
squint always meant that interesting developments would follow.
"Norman Ware," she said, slowly, "I didn't give you credit for being a
genius, but you are as great in one way as Emerson. You've hit on one of
his ideas all by yourself. He said, 'If a man can write a better book,
preach a better sermon or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbours,
though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten
track to his door,' If you want company as bad as all that, you _shall_
have a beaten track to your door. We'll build something better than the
neighbours ever dreamed of, and it won't be a mouse-trap, either.
There's enough old lumber here to build half a dozen cages, and if
you'll pay for the wire netting out of your share of the garden profits,
I'll help you put up a menagerie that P.T. Barnum himself wouldn't have
been ashamed of."
Norman's answer was a whoop and a double somersault, and he came up on
his feet again remarking that she was worth all the fellows in Lone-Rock
put together.
"According to what you've just said that isn't very much of a
compliment," laughed Mary. Still it gratified her so much that presently
she was planning a side-show for the menagerie. There were all her
mounted specimens of trap-door spiders and butterflies and desert
insects. She would loan the collection occasionally, and her stuffed
Gila monster and the arrow-heads and rattle-snake skins that she and
Holland had collected.
As she hammered and sawed she told Norman the story of _The Jester's
Sword_. "That is one reason I am taking so much interest in this," she
explained. "I've been thinking for days about what the old friar said,
that men need laughter sometimes more than food, and if we haven't any
cheer to spare ourselves, we may go a-gathering it from door to door as
he did crusts and carry it to those who need. That is why I have gone on
long walks and made so many calls on the few people that are here, so
that I'd have something amusing to tell Jack when I came home. But he
has seemed to find my 'crusts of cheer' mighty dry food, and he didn't
take half the interest in them that he did in talking to L�pe to-day."
"L�pe will make a beaten track to _his_ door fast enough," prophesied
Norman, "when he finds we want to buy more animals. I'll send word
to-night to him to set his traps for those coyotes and foxes."
That evening after supper, Jack wheeled himself out on to the porch. It
was the first time he had attempted it, and when he had made the trip
successfully, he sat a few minutes watching the stars. They seemed
unusually brilliant, and he amused himself in tracing the constellations
with which he was familiar. It had been a family study at the Wigwam,
and they had learned many things from the little Atlas of the Heavens
which Mrs. Ware kept among her other old school books. Presently he
called Mary.
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