The remainder of the cherry pie dropped to the dust of the Winterbottom Road. Not more than three gigantic leaps brought Ken to the spot; he vaulted the wall with a clean and magnificent spring that would have won him fame at school. The man was a stranger, as Ken had thought--an untidy and unshaven stranger. He was not quite so tall as Ken, who seized him by the arm. "May I ask where you're going?" roared Ken, at which the small boy leaped rapturously, fastened himself to Ken's coat-tail, and cried: "Oh, I'm so glad it's you! I started to come and meet you, and I walked farther than I meant, and I got lost, and I met this person, and he said he'd take me home, and--" "Shut up!" said Ken. "_And let go of me!"_ at which Kirk, thoroughly shocked, dropped back as though he could not believe his ears. "I was takin' the kid home," muttered the man, "just like he says." "Why were you going in exactly the opposite direction, then?" Ken demanded. As he leaped abreast of the man, who was trying to back away, the day's receipts of the Sturgis Water Line jingled loudly in his trousers pocket. The stranger, whose first plan had been so rudely interfered with, determined on the instant not to leave altogether empty-handed, and planted a forcible and unexpected blow on the side of Ken's head. Ken staggered and went down, and Kirk, who had been standing dangerously near all this activity, went down on top of him. It so happened that he sprawled exactly on top of the trousers pocket aforesaid, and when the man sought, with hasty and ungentle hands, to remove him from it, Kirk launched a sudden and violent kick, in the hope of its doing some execution. Kirk's boots were stout, and himself horrified and indignant; his heel caught the stranger with full force in the temple, and the man, too, was added to the prostrate figures in the darkening field. Two of them did not long remain prostrate. Ken lurched, bewildered, to his feet, and seeing his foe stretched by some miracle upon the ground, he bundled Kirk over the wall and followed giddily. Stumbling down the shadowy road, with Kirk's hand in his, he said: "That was good luck. I must have given the gentleman a crack as he got me." "He was trying to steal your money, I think," Kirk said. "I was lying on top of you, so I kicked him, hard." "Oh, _that_ was it, was it?" Ken exclaimed. "Well, very neat work, even if not sporting. By the way, excuse me for speaking to you the way I did, but it wasn't any time to have a talk. You precious, trusting little idiot, don't you know better than to go off with the first person who comes along?" "He said he'd take me home," Kirk said plaintively. "I told him where it was."