"Yes, I am," answered the stranger, his eyes fixed upon the odd figure before him. "Well, there they are," the boy said, pointing upward to the grotesque dancing shadows. "Eh?--I beg your pardon, I--I don't understand. Just what has happened?" asked the stranger. "Nothin'," said Jack. "The lamp gets tipped over when they're playing Old Mother Gibson, and they just throw it out so's not to set the house afire." "Every night?" asked the man, in the polite tone strangers adopt in striving to fathom a local mystery. "Nope," said the boy, in a matter-of-fact tone. "They can't play it every night; sometimes their aunt won't let 'em." "You appear to know them." There was a smile hidden beneath the voice; but Jack was thinking, not of the questioner, indistinguishable in the darkness, but of the mad carnival up yonder on the hill. "Yep. That's Split," he said. "That one--see--with the bushy lot of hair, singing and cake-walking in front. She can do a cake-walk better'n any nigger I ever see." "Indeed!" "That's Frank, the baby--the one that's screamin' so. You can tell her squeals; they're laughin' ones, you know." "I suppose I ought to know. Anyway, I'm glad to be told." "Over on the side there, where there's a kind of blotch, is the twins; they must be fighting. Don, the dog, 's mixed up in it somehow." "My word!" exclaimed the man, softly, to himself. "That's Kate dancing round on the porch, and the one standing high-like, right next to the fire, with her arms up stiff, as if she was running the whole show, sort of--of--" "A priestess, say, invocating the Goddess of Kerosene!" "Huh?--Well, that's Sissy." "Oh, is it? Tell me--is she nice--Sissy?" "What?" asked the boy, so surprised that he withdrew his attention from on high and stared out at the man on the door-step. There came a laugh out of the darkness. "It is an odd question, but then everything is so odd out here, I half hoped you wouldn't notice it. But you do know them, evidently. I wonder--do you mind going up there with me and showing me the way?" But his last question had suddenly recalled to Jack Cody the reason why he wasn't at that moment one of the dancing black figures on the hill. The boy looked from his mother's wrapper to the man's face, growing more distinct now, out on the door-step, and the amused expression he saw there his sore egotism attributed to a personal cause. So he promptly slammed the door in the man's face. There was an instant's pause out in the blackness, made denser now that the candle's light from the cabin was cut off; then a short, nonplussed laugh.