sort of thing John and Michael had been doing all their lives, sitting
on stools flinging balls in the air, pushing each other, going out for
walks and coming back without having killed so much as a grizzly. To
see Peter doing nothing on a stool was a great sight; he could not help
looking solemn at such times, to sit still seemed to him such a comic
thing to do. He boasted that he had gone walking for the good of his
health. For several suns these were the most novel of all adventures to
him; and John and Michael had to pretend to be delighted also;
otherwise he would have treated them severely.
He often went out alone, and when he came back you were never
absolutely certain whether he had had an adventure or not. He might
have forgotten it so completely that he said nothing about it; and then
when you went out you found the body; and, on the other hand, he might
say a great deal about it, and yet you could not find the body.
Sometimes he came home with his head bandaged, and then Wendy cooed
over him and bathed it in lukewarm water, while he told a dazzling
tale. But she was never quite sure, you know. There were, however, many
adventures which she knew to be true because she was in them herself,
and there were still more that were at least partly true, for the other
boys were in them and said they were wholly true. To describe them all
would require a book as large as an English-Latin, Latin-English
Dictionary, and the most we can do is to give one as a specimen of an
average hour on the island. The difficulty is which one to choose.
Should we take the brush with the redskins at Slightly Gulch? It was a
sanguinary affair, and especially interesting as showing one of Peter s
peculiarities, which was that in the middle of a fight he would
suddenly change sides. At the Gulch, when victory was still in the
balance, sometimes leaning this way and sometimes that, he called out,
I m redskin to-day; what are you, Tootles? And Tootles answered,
Redskin; what are you, Nibs? and Nibs said, Redskin; what are you
Twin? and so on; and they were all redskins; and of course this would
have ended the fight had not the real redskins fascinated by Peter s
methods, agreed to be lost boys for that once, and so at it they all
went again, more fiercely than ever.
The extraordinary upshot of this adventure was but we have not decided
yet that this is the adventure we are to narrate. Perhaps a better one
would be the night attack by the redskins on the house under the
ground, when several of them stuck in the hollow trees and had to be
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