Davy

He wasn’t actualy big — not as tall as Sam — but managed to seem so, partly with the help of a thick black shag of beard that grew half-way down his chest. The black tangle matching it on his head hadn’t been cut for two or three months, but I noticed the man had his vanities: his brown shirt and white loin-rag were clean and fresh, and his hairy legs wound up in a pair of moose-hide moccasins as wonderful as any I ever saw, for their gilt ornaments were nudes, and the antics he could make those golden girls perform just by wiggling his toes would have stirred up the juices of youth in the dustiest Egyptian mummy and I mean a married one.

Sam said: “I get a feeling that’s their boss-man, Jackson. Look him over. Try and imagine him getting mad about something.”

I swung myself over the fence. Once over, I felt everyone watching me — the girls, the card-players, even the white-haired man from under his straw hat, and the blackbearded boss-man whose voice was still going on in a mild rumble like a thunder-roll ten miles away. “Da,” I said — Sam smiled quickly, wincingly as if all pleasure were partly pain, and I dare say it is — “Da, I can imagine it, but I can’t no-way express it.”

“Uhha. Well, you heam tell about the hazy old fa’mer that got so nearsighted he set out to milk a bull?”

“And so then?”

“So nothing, Jackson, nothing special except they do say he a’n’t come down yet, not to this day.”

I had to go over then, or not at all. My good white loinrag helped, but crossing the immense twenty yards between me and the musicians, my knees quivered, and my hands too, as I lifted out the golden horn and let the sunlight touch it; however, the way their faces gleamed with interest and excitement at seeing the horn cleared away my jitters and left me free to be another friendly human being myself. I said: “Can I make some music with you?”

The kitten with the dangerous lock of hair on her forehead and the quail with the bedroom lips were suddenly all business and no mockery. Music was serious. Bo

“Yes. I a’n’t had it long. I can only play a few airs.”

“Bass range?”

“Nay, seems best in the middle — I know there’s notes on both sides I can’t play yet.”

Somebody said: “Boy ’pears to be honest.” I’d felt all along I was being watched from under that straw hat.

The girls paid Stud no attention. “What airs do you know?” Mi

“Well,” I said — “well, ‘Greensleeves’ — ‘Londonderry Air’—” Mi

The white-haired drummer had swung his arm to beckon a friend or two. People were coming out of the wagons. The flute-player and the cornet man had given up their card-game and were just standing by, listening, thinking it over. So well was the horn responding to me, for a minute I was in danger of thinking it was my playing that drew them and not the Old-Time magic of the horn itself. When I play nowadays that may be true; it can’t have been true that day, though even sweet sharp Bo

When I had (I thought) finished the melody, Mi

Do you know, we didn’t goof, much? I was ready when Bo

When Bo

Bo

When the song was done, and she’d waved and blown a kiss to the crowd, which was stomping and clapping, even a few of them snuffling — why, didn’t she grab my shirt to pull me on my feet? “C’m’ on, kid!” she said — “they love you too.”

There was a dizzying pleasure in it, not spoiled by my knowledge that most of the excitement was for Bo

Nickie and Dion still quarrel occasionally about correcting the places where I goof the spelling. I can’t interfere much, because I did ask them to, away back when I started this book. The last time I heard them beating away at it was very recently, in fact only a few minutes ago, I can’t think why. I had dozed off in the sunshine or appeared to, and I heard Nickie ask Dion how he could be sure I hadn’t meant to write it that way. “Can’t,” he admitted, “and even if I could, why should I be elected to defend the mother tongue against the assaults of a redheaded songbird, politician, hornplayer and drunken sailor? Hasn’t she been raped by experts for centuries past counting, ever since Chaucer made such a bitched-up mess of trying to spell her, and doesn’t she still perk?”