I was glad to see Jake's grin
again, and Otto's ferocious mustaches. The young Cuzaks knew all about
them.
"He made grandfather's coffin, did n't he?" Anton asked.
"Was n't they good fellows, Jim?" Antonia's eyes filled. "To this day I'm
ashamed because I quarreled with Jake that way. I was saucy and
impertinent to him, Leo, like you are with people sometimes, and I wish
somebody had made me behave."
"We are n't through with you, yet," they warned me. They produced a
photograph taken just before I went away to college; a tall youth in
striped trousers and a straw hat, trying to look easy and jaunty.
"Tell us, Mr. Burden," said Charley, "about the rattler you killed at the
dog town. How long was he? Sometimes mother says six feet and sometimes
she says five."
These children seemed to be upon very much the same terms with Antonia as
the Harling children had been so many years before. They seemed to feel
the same pride in her, and to look to her for stories and entertainment as
we used to do.
It was eleven o'clock when I at last took my bag and some blankets and
started for the barn with the boys. Their mother came to the door with us,
and we tarried for a moment to look out at the white slope of the corral
and the two ponds asleep in the moonlight, and the long sweep of the
pasture under the star-sprinkled sky.
The boys told me to choose my own place in the haymow, and I lay down
before a big window, left open in warm weather, that looked out into the
stars.
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