No one was in sight except two
barefooted searchers after clams a few hundred yards farther up the
beach and a man working in a field half a mile away. The bay shimmered
in the broiling August sun and from a distant grove came the rattle and
wheeze of locusts. Throggs Neck blazed in silence, and utterly silent
was the house of Appleboy.
With an air of bravado, but with a slightly accelerated heartbeat,
Tunnygate thrust himself through the hole in the hedge and looked
scornfully about the Appleboy lawn. A fierce rage worked through his
veins. A lawn! What effrontery! What business had these condescending
second-raters to presume to improve a perfectly good beach which was
satisfactory to other folks? He'd show 'em! He took a step in the
direction of the transplanted sea grass. Unexpectedly the door of the
Appleboy kitchen opened.
"I warned you!" enunciated Mr. Appleboy with unnatural calmness, which
with another background might have struck almost anybody as suspicious.
"Huh!" returned the startled Tunnygate, forced under the circumstances
to assume a nonchalance that he did not altogether feel. "You!"
"Well," repeated Mr. Appleboy. "Don't ever say I didn't!"
"Pshaw!" ejaculated Mr. Tunnygate disdainfully.
With premeditation and deliberation, and with undeniable malice
aforethought, he kicked the nearest bunch of sea grass several feet in
the air. His violence carried his leg high in the air and he partially
lost his equilibrium.
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