Nat snapped up into the air. Then he assumed a Direction. Luckily the open church door was ahead. Into the soft spring dusk he shot and began to tread the world beneath him crazily. His not to reason why, his but to flee or die; Nathan cleared the doorstep into thin air and zoomed for the horizon. I was close behind him. We negotiated the walk, the curb and the street. We made the opposite walk and kept on going. We went through Pat Larkin’s side yard and Mrs. Larkin’s choicest roses. A lot of sweet-pea vines came next, with most of them trailing behind us. Nat stepped on a cucumber frame and I plowed through a couple of yards of hen wire. Thereupon we got through the Alderman property into Adams Street. But we did not stop there. We went through Adams Street, through Pine and Walnut. Then out of town by the pumping station. We covered two miles that night before we finally plunged into Bancroft’s Woods far down the river. There we crawled into the underbrush and squatted on our haunches. Said Nathan, “Who was it?” Said I, “It was Mr. Gridley!” Sickening silence! “Where’d he come from?” Nathan finally found strength to ask. “He came down the belfry stairs! I remember now there was something the matter with the bell-rope this morning. He must have gone up with John Chase to fix it.” “Her father!” groaned Nathan. “Billy—this is the end!” “Not on your tintype it ain’t! It’s only the beginning!” I retorted. “Billy—what are we going to do?” So Guy Fawkes must have queried his lieutenants when the well-known Gunpowder Plot went slightly awry. “I dunno, Nathan. It’s a cinch we can’t go home! We can’t ever go home again!” “That’s right,” agreed Nathan. “Maybe Mr. Gridley is at my house right this minute, tellin’ it all to dad!” “It looks, Nathan, as if we’d have to leave this place for good and all. Have you got any money?” “Twenty cents,” said my friend, totaling his pockets. “I’ve got a dollar-seventy in my bank at home, if I could sneak in and get it out.” “That’d be a dollar-ninety. We could live a long time on a dollar-ninety.” “Where’d we go?” I asked. “West, I guess. Everybody goes west. Nap Taro went west and come back rich. Maybe down the future years, if we could come back rich, they’d forgive us.” “But how’d we get there? It costs more’n a dollar-ninety to get west. And we gotta eat in the meantime.” “We’d have to hop freight trains like the tramps. It’s a cinch we gotta get outa here or the police’ll catch us.” “Oh, dear, I wisht we hadn’t done it!” I groaned. “So do I,” lamented Nathan feverishly. “But it’s done now and can’t be undone.” “That’s right. I don’t know as I ever heard of anybody unkissing a girl. And we won’t be able to grow up and marry Elinore and Bernie at all——” “Maybe if we wrote a letter to ’em after we got west, they’d wait for us. Women do that sort of thing sometimes—till death.” “But they’re probably mad at us by now.”