The foreman couldn"t wait any longer.
"I"ve got to go now, Davie."
"Where have you got to go?" David asked. "Can I go with you?"
"I"ve got to go into the house. I can"t take you in there yet. I"m afraid you"d get hurt. In a day or two you can go in."
David nodded. He was thinking about those pipes.
"Will the men keep on putting those pipes together until they come to the house?" he asked. "And how will they get the pipe into the house?
They"ll have to put it through a window."
"No," the foreman answered, "they won"t have to put it through a window. They"ll lay the pipes straight past the house, and they"ll plug up the end until there are some more houses built on this road.
"Then they"ll fit a little pipe into the side of the big pipe and run it through a hole in the cellar wall.
"The little pipe is not much bigger than that pipe that the faucet is on, over by the mortar box. What"ll you do now, Davie?--play in the sand?"
David nodded again. "Good-bye," he said.
"Good-bye." And the foreman went into the house.
And David dug in the sand for a while, and then he looked for his cat, but he didn"t see her; so he put his shovel and his hoe into the cart, and walked off, dragging the cart, with the shovel and the hoe rattling in the bottom of it.
And when he got to the pipes, the cat popped out of the end of one of them, and she ran ahead of David, with her bushy tail sticking straight up in the air, and David walked along to his house.
And that"s all.
VI
THE SHINGLE AND CLAPBOARD STORY
Once upon a time there was a little boy, and he was almost five years old, and his name was David. And there weren"t any other children near for him to play with, so he used to play happily all by himself.
He had his cat and his cart and his shovel and his hoe, and he always wore his overalls when he was playing.
One day he wandered up to the corner of the road that he lived on.
He wasn"t allowed to go beyond that corner, and his mother didn"t like to have him go so far as the corner.
But he was pretending, and he didn"t know how far he had come.
He played in the gravel of the gutter for a long time, and he was talking nearly all the time.
His cat was there, taking little runs away, with her bushy tail sticking straight up in the air. Then she would lie down on her back and play with the air, and then she always jumped up in a great hurry and ran back to David and rubbed against him.
But David wasn"t talking to his cat, and he wasn"t talking to himself.
He was talking to the pretend child who was his playmate and who had come there holding to the other handle of his cart and helping him drag it.
And he was so busy that he didn"t notice the great wagon that was just about to turn the corner.
The driver called to him.
"Hey, little boy! Don"t get run over."
David scrambled up on the sidewalk before he even looked, for he remembered to be careful.
Then he looked, and he saw a big wagon that was drawn by two horses, and the wagon was loaded with short, shiny boards, tied together in bundles, and on top of the bundles of short, shiny boards were bundles of shingles, a great many of them.
David knew what shingles looked like when they came in bundles, but he wondered what the shiny, short boards were.
But he didn"t ask, because the horses were almost trotting, they were walking so fast, and the driver seemed to be pretty busy.
He supposed that the shingles and things were going to the new house, and he watched the wagon until it stopped there.
Then he took up the handle of his cart, and he walked off with it as fast as he could walk, and then he began to run, and his shovel and his hoe rattled so that you would have thought they would rattle out.
The pretend child didn"t go with David, for he had forgotten all about her.
Sometimes the child was a girl and sometimes it was a boy; but it was a girl that morning. She was left in the gutter at the corner.
And David didn"t call his cat, and the cat stayed at the corner for a while, and first she looked at the pretend little girl and then she looked after David, and she didn"t know which to go with.
But at last she went running after David, and she caught up with him, and she ran on ahead, with her bushy tail sticking straight up in the air.
When David got to the house, he found the wagon there, and the horses were standing still, and the driver was throwing off the bundles of shingles and another man was piling them up.
They had got almost to the shiny, short boards.
And the foreman was there, and he was putting something down with a very short pencil in a little old book.
"h.e.l.lo," said David. "What are--"
But the foreman interrupted him.
"Just wait a minute, Davie, until I get these checked up."
So David waited a long time, but the wagon was unloaded at last, and the little book put in the foreman"s pocket.
"Now, Davie," the foreman said, "what was it that you were asking me?"
"I was asking what are these," said David, putting his hand on a bundle of the shiny boards.
"Those are clapboards, Davie."