“Praises be!” ejaculated Jones. “Well, better run along and get your beauty sleep. Just remember this, though, young Fessenden. Never cry till you’re hurt, and not then if you can help it. And never, never let yourself get frightened. Whatever it is that gets your goat, son, go straight up to it and poke it in the jaw. Just like Locke did! And that was a neat swing, I’ll say.” “I――I’ll try,” said Fessenden, gratefully. “And thanks for making them――for everything――” “That’s all right. If you feel under obligations to this gentleman and me, just go up and play the tiddly-widdly thing through for us. I’d like to know what happens after the peety-weety-weety part!” “Queer bird,” commented Jones, as he and Barry crossed the road. “High-strung,” said Barry. “He’s at my table and we were talking at supper. I think he’s been sort of homesick.” “I’d think he might be, staying in that room and playing his fiddle all day. I can get homesick just listening to one of the things――some kind of sick, anyway! Let’s sit here a minute and see if he fiddles for us.” He seated himself on the porch and Barry dropped down beside him. Across the road a front window in the opposite house became an oblong of light. “Where’d you learn to fight like that?” asked Jones. “At home. There’s a chap who has a gymnasium and gives lessons in boxing and wrestling. Clyde Allen and I got it into our heads a couple of years ago that we’d like to learn and we went to him most of one year. Some of the other fellows in high school went, too, and we used to have boxing bouts at Clyde’s house, up in the billiard-room on the third floor, until the plaster began to give way in Mrs. Allen’s bedroom.” “You and Allen are pretty chummy, then,” said Jones. “Yes. Well, I don’t know, either. We’ve known each other a long while and we live only three houses apart. Clyde was a year ahead of me at school, though, and for the last two years we haven’t been quite so thick. And then, last fall, he came here, and last summer, at Orchard Bluff, he took up with an older crowd. But of course we’re pretty good friends.” “I see. Listen!” Through the darkness, from the lighted window across the way, came the strains of the “tiddly-widdly” air, played very softly. As the player neared the dangerous stage Jones turned to Barry with a little smile and held up a finger. But now the bow didn’t falter. It went swiftly through a maze of tiny notes, unerringly, triumphantly, paused over a thin, silvery tone, and descended to the lower notes for a repetition of the opening movement and was still.