Incipient hostilities were halted by the appearance—or condition—of the new boy’s face. Twenty-four years have passed since that morning. I have beheld many boys. Yet never since a freshly molded clay Adam was pronounced a reasonably passable job and stood against the nearest rock to dry has one human being looked into the features of another, regardless of age, and beheld such freckles. I once knew a boy who had thirty-one thousand seven hundred and eighty-four freckles, not counting those behind his ears or a few odd thousand remaining, sprinkled across the back of his neck. The average boy manages to worry along with eighteen or twenty thousand. But the infinity of freckles upon that new boy’s face was beyond all computation. The Lord might have known the number of hairs in his head, but there He stopped. It would have been hopeless even to try to separate those freckles so to compute them, anyhow. “Aw, you don’t need to tell me your old name,” I condescended. “You’re one o’ them Forges that’s moved up to Brown’s.” “Howja guess?” “I know by your freckles. I heard Lawyer Campbell call your folks ‘them freckled Forges.’ Your ma’s got ’em and so’s your pa. You’ve all got ’em—like measles ’n itch.” Instead of growing more bellicose, the new boy became apologetic. “Yeah, but they ain’t got so many as me—Ma and Pa ain’t. Anyhow, I can’t help it. I got a torpedoed liver.” “You gotta _what_?” “A torpedoed liver!” “What’s a torpedoed liver?” He tried to explain. In the light of a maturer understanding, I assume he meant a torpid liver. But I was little wiser than he that morning, so one liver was as good as another. “Year, but they ain’t got so many as me—Ma and Pa leaves. Ma says all us Forges has got too much iron in our blood and it makes us rust all over, outside.” “Iron in yer blood!” I looked at the Forge boy incredulously. Was he spoofing me? “Howja know?” I demanded. “Can yer hear it clank together?” I had a mental suggestion of sundry billets and bars of cold steel, wagon springs, old horseshoes, machine castings circulating through the new boy’s system and wondered how he managed it. “Naw,” he went on. “’Tain’t that kind of iron. It’s all melted or ground up to powder or sumpin’. I ain’t never heard it make no noise, anyway.” “Maybe we ain’t got no floatin’ iron in our family,” I defended, “but my Aunt Lucy’s got sumpin’ just as good and horrible. She’s got floatin’ ribs, three of ’em. Betcha you ain’t got nobody in your old family with floatin’ ribs.” It was now the small Forge boy’s turn to show incredulity. And momentarily I exulted. “But ribs don’t float,” he contradicted. “They’re hitched to yer backbone and run around yer stomach like hoops. I seen a pitcher of a man with his skin off, once. If they was loose and floated, you’d be all flat and hollow and sort of pushed in across your chest.”