first successful tunnel they had dug way back there. Covered with dust and prickly alfalfa shoots and gasping from exertion, each emerged from his end of the tunnel shouting and flushed with triumph. Panting they sat down side by side. Paul looked at Dave with his immense, brown eyes, his jet black hair almost blue in the dust-filtered sunlight.

"I sure like your color!" said Dave. "I wish I wasn't white!"

Paul answered in a surprisingly mature tone for he was only fourteen at the time: "Black's not a lucky color. You be glad you're what you are."

"But it's so much nicer to look at! Oh, it's handsome, Paul!"

And suddenly a remarkable thing happened. Paul put his hand on Dave's knee so casually you might not think he knew he'd done it. A great something burst within him and Dave kissed him quickly on the cheek. It was over just that fast.

"Silly," said Paul and gave Dave a shove which sent him rolling joyously to the bottom of the mound. He got to his feet and ran after Paul who darted like an animal in and out of tunnels, up the ladder to the loft. He flew in a fair imitation of a swan dive from the heights into the soft mound below, and stopped with a frantic jerk only when his coat hooked itself to a stanchion in the cow shed. Dave seized the opportunity to catch him and, they wrestled wildly rolling over and over together out of joy at intimate contact as well as excess of adolescent

spirits.

In the past two years many things had happened. Pleasant things, mostly. But there were unpleasant ones, too, like the time Dave's father had demanded to know why Dave spent so much time with "that black Hunter family." Dave had answered simply, "Because I love them," and his father had looked sort of sick and turned away. Others-Dave's schoolmateshad occasionally made remarks about Dave liking Paul too much and one day someone had drawn two hearts on the blackboard with an arrow piercing them and their initials.

Dave thought all this, while acutely embarrassing, pretty silly. The truth, as he saw it, was simply that he liked Paul better than anyone in the whole world precisely because Paul and his mother and father and older brother were the first people (outside of his mother) who had ever been good to him.

In the Hunter's tiny house behind the filling station near the bridge winter had been a time of especial joy. Then you could run to the Hunter's directly from school, have supper of fried potatoes, steak and chocolate cake with lots of milk and afterwards sit around the red-hot, pot-bellied stove in the living-dining room while Mrs. Hunter read her Bible and Mr. Hunter told again of his trip on a tramp steamer to Rio when he was a boy before he came to South Dakota to start a farm.

Sometimes Mrs. Hunter would look

one

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