"Lord! no," said the boy contemptuously. "There ain't no chance now, and
there wouldn't be any fun in it. It isn't like the old times when him
and me were all alone, and we used to write letters as coming from other
people to all the boys round Heavy Tree and the Bar, and sometimes as
far as Boomville, to get them to do things, and they'd think the letters
were real, and they'd do 'em. And there'd be the biggest kind of a row,
and nobody ever knew who did it."
Steptoe stared at this flesh of his own flesh half in relief, half in
frightened admiration. Sitting astride the log, his elbows on his knees
and his gloved hands supporting his round cheeks, the boy's handsome
face became illuminated with an impish devilry which the father had
never seen before. With dancing eyes he went on. "It was one of those
very games we played so long ago that he wanted to see me about and
wanted me to keep mum about, for some of the folks that he played it on
were around here now. It was a game we got off on one of the big strike
partners long before the strike. I'll tell YOU, dad, for you know
what happened afterwards, and you'll be glad. Well, that
partner--Demorest--was a kind of silly, you remember--a sort of Miss
Nancyish fellow--always gloomy and lovesick after his girl in the
States. Well, we'd written lots of letters to girls from their chaps
before, and got lots of fun out of it; but we had even a better show
for a game here, for it happened that Van Loo knew all about the
girl--things that even the man's own partners didn't, for Van Loo's
mother was a sort of a friend of the girl's family, and traveled about
with her, and knew that the girl was spoony over this Demorest, and that
they corresponded.
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