Across the fire, in an aged and uncertain rocking-chair, placid as though she were sitting beside a gas-log instead of a camp-fire over-gloomed with winter woods, was Mother, darning a sock and lecturing the homicidal-looking Crook McKusick on cursing and swearing and carryings-on. Crook stared down at her adoringly, and just when she seemed to have penetrated his tough hide with her moral injunctions he chuckled: "By golly! I believe I'll marry and settle down--just as soon as I can find a moll that'll turn into a cute old lady like you, aunty." "Now, Mr. McKusick," she said, severely, "you want to reform for the sake of reforming, not just to please some girl--not but what a nice sweet woman would be good--" "Nothing will ever be good for me, aunty. I'm gone. This sweet civilization of ours has got me. The first reform school I went to reformed me, all right--formed me into a crook. I used to show signs of growing up to be fair to middling intelligent, once. But now--nothing to it. You people, though you're twice as old as I am, you're twice as young. You got a chance. Look here, Uncle Appleby, why don't you go out for being one of these famous old pedestrians that get their mugs in the papers? Will you do what I tell you to, if I train you? I've trained quite some pugs before--before I quit." Mother acerbically declined to learn the art of physical culture. "Me at my time of life learning to do monkey-shines and bending and flapping my arms like a chicken with its head cut off." But Father enthusiastically and immediately started in to become the rival of the gentlemen in jerseys who wear rubber heels in the advertisements and spend their old ages in vigorously walking from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, merely in order to walk back again. While his fellow-hoboes about the fire jeered, Father bent over forty times, and raised himself on his toes sixty, and solemnly took breathing-exercises. Next day he slowly trotted ninety times about the clearing, his chin up and his chest out, while Crook McKusick, excited at being a trainer again, snapped orders at him and talked about form.... A ludicrous figure, a little old man, his white locks flapping under a mushy cap as he galloped earnestly through the light snow. But his cheeks were one red glow, his eyes were bright, and in his laugh, when he finished, was infinite hope. If it had been Mother who had first taken charge of the camp and converted it to respectability and digestible food, it was Father who really ran it, for he was the only person who could understand her and Crook McKusick and the sloppy Kid all at once. Crook McKusick had long cultivated a careful habit of getting drunk once a week. But two weeks after the coming of the Applebys he began to omit his sprees, because Mother needed him to help her engineer variations of the perpetual mulligan, and Father needed him for his regular training.