But at any moment, especially as he came on to be ten years old, quite suddenly and inexplicably he grew tired of it. The illusion would pass ... they would be just lifeless stupid dead soldiers, with broken legs and rifles, and the paint flaking off ... impossible to imagine anything with them. Also his arms and legs would feel numb with sitting still on the floor so long. Then Neale would slide noiselessly down the banisters, using his hands and legs as a brake to keep from crashing into the newel-post, slip by the dining-room door with its clinking coffee-cups and blue haze of cigar smoke, grab his cap and go quietly outdoors. Nobody would have stopped him, he knew that, but it was more fun to keep it quiet. Free from the house he would act out his drama of escape by running for a block or so, and then drop into the roaming boy's slow, zig-zag ramble. You can walk south or north on Union Hill for miles beyond a boy's endurance, without finding a single feature to quicken the imagination; but if you go east or west from anywhere on the Hill, you come at once to a jumping-off place where below you stretches the flat, marshy river or the flats. Neale preferred the western edge, even though it had no steep rocks. He was far from having any conscious love for landscape, but he found a certain satisfaction in looking over the yellow and brown expanse of the marsh-grass and cat-tails, hazy in the afternoon sun, cut with straight black lines of railroads (he named them over to himself, identifying every one, the Jersey Central, Pennsylvania, Erie, Lackawanna, and Jersey Northern), each with little toy-trains, each tiny locomotive sending up little balls of cotton-wool to hang motionless in the still afternoon air. To the southwest a hazy blur that was Newark, and right in front, like a doomed mountain, bogged and sinking into the marsh, the sinister bulk of Snake Hill. Neale used to stand and brood over it, sometimes till the sun went down, all red and orange. He did not stir till the cold roused him to think of home and supper. But his feet did not always turn westward. Sometimes he walked to the eastern edge. The rocks were steeper here, steep enough to be the impregnable fortress he always imagined them. When he came here, after reconnoitering the ground (for his tribal enemy did not observe the Truce of God on Sundays), Neale would go out to the edge of the sheerest promontory and dangle his legs down. Under his feet were railroad tracks again, then a belt of vacant lots, some of them black with cinder-filling, others green with the scum of stagnant water, then a belt of frame houses where the enemy lived, then a zone of city brick and flat tin roofs. Beyond it all was Castle Point, high and green (healthy green this, not scum), jutting out into the Hudson. Indistinctly he could make out the other side of the river, the line of ships at the wharves and more city ... New York.