Far away to-day where the sky drops down and the sunsets open doors for the nights to come through—where the running winds meet, change faces and come back—there the gophers are playing the-green-grass-grew-all-around, playing cross tag, skip tag, hop tag, billy-be-tag, billy-be-it. And sometimes they sit in a circle and ask, “What does this ‘Bah!’ mean?” And an old timer answers, “‘Bah!’ speaks more than it means whenever it is spoken.” That was the story the young rat under the oleanders, under the roses, told the other young rat, while the two sweetheart dippies sat on the fence in the moonlight looking at the lumber and listening. The young rat who told the story hardly got started eating the nail he was chewing, while the young rat that did the listening chewed up and swallowed down a whole nail. As the two dippies on the fence looked at the running wild oleander and the running wild rambler roses over the lumber in the moonlight, they said to each other, “It’s easy to be a dippy ... among the dippies ... isn’t it?” And they climbed down from the fence and went home in the moonlight. [Illustration] 7. Two Stories Out of the Tall Grass. _People_: John Jack Johannes Hummadummaduffer Feed Box Eva Evelyn Evangeline Hummadummaduffer Sky Blue The Harvest Moon A Haystack Cricket Baby Moon Half Moon Silver Moon Doorbells, Chimneys, Cellars The Night Policeman in the Village of Cream Puffs Butter Fingers Three Strikes Cub Ballplayers [Illustration] The Haystack Cricket and How Things Are Different Up in the Moon Towns There is an old man with wrinkles like wrinkled leather on his face living among the cornfields on the rolling prairie near the Shampoo river. His name is John Jack Johannes Hummadummaduffer. His cronies and the people who know him call him Feed Box. His daughter is a cornfield girl with hair shining the way cornsilk shines when the corn is ripe in the fall time. The tassels of cornsilk hang down and blow in the wind with a rusty dark gold, and they seem to get mixed with her hair. Her name is Eva Evelyn Evangeline Hummadummaduffer. And her chums and the people who know her call her Sky Blue. The eleventh month, November, comes every year to the corn belt on that rolling prairie. The wagons bring the corn from the fields in the harvest days and the cracks in the corncribs shine with the yellow and gold of the corn. The harvest moon comes, too. They say it stacks sheaves of the November gold moonshine into gold corn shocks on the sky. So they say. On those mornings in November that time of the year, the old man they call Feed Box sits where the sun shines against the boards of a corncrib.