Gabe cracked a smile and said, “Keep watching me and you’ll learn more, sonny.” Jack shook his head and laughed a little, launching a wad of spittle across the narrow stream created by the spring. A contest immediately began, to see who could spit the farthest. Demonstrating that he wasn’t completely grown up, Gabe joined in, winning the contest by a couple of feet.
The boys resumed work on a fort they had begun several days before. They had to put the finishing touches on the stick roof they had meticulously woven together with twine from home and smaller diameter vines they had hacked from the trees. This was just one of many forts they had constructed over the past few years. The grand castle of all their forts rested about a mile north of their house; a hundred yards to the east of the railroad tracks and a hundred yards north of the third hole of the golf course.
A large, old elm tree had fallen over, creating a natural cave-like area beneath it. There was enough room for an adult to stand up inside and branches covered the sides. The brothers had filled in the sparsely covered sides of the natural fort with sticks they had gathered from the ground and branches they cut from saplings, completing the most beautiful structure they had ever had the fortune to discover, improve, and use.
In the center of the fort, they had dug a three foot diameter by six-inch deep hole and lined it with rocks found nearby, and built small fires, cooking cans of beans and roasting hotdogs they had pilfered from home.
On one of the days when Gabe had gone to the fort alone, he surprised a shabbily dressed man cooking a pot of beans over their fire pit, his pot was hanging from the sticks the brothers had dug into the ground and bent over the fire ring. Growing up by the railroad tracks, the brothers always referred to such men as bums, because that’s what their mother and father had called them. Driftless men crossing the country on the rails, stopping for a day here and there for a little respite from riding the trains.
Gabe had noticed smoke rising from the fort as soon as he had stepped from the railroad tracks. He carefully made his way down the twenty foot embankment, taking care not to create any noise. His first thought was that he was going to surprise one of the other neighborhood kids messing around within he and his brothers’ fort and make him pay a physical price for it. Sneaking quietly, Gabe inched his way to the entrance and then burst inside. He stopped quickly when he realized it wasn’t any kid he confronted, but a grown man holding a menacing looking club in his hands.
“Well, you want a piece of this club or not?” the bum asked in a leathery voice.
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