For a long time he had been publishing their threatening letters and warnings in a column which he headed: "Humor of the Day." "Harkless don't understand the Cross-Roads," Briscoe said to Miss Sherwood as they left the Wimby farm behind; "and then he's like most of us; hardly any of us realizes that harm's ever going to come to _us_.
Harkless was anxious enough about other people, but----" The young lady interrupted him, touching his arm.

"Look!" she said, "Didn't you see a child, a little girl, ahead of us on the road ?" "I noticed one a minute ago, but she's not there now," answered Briscoe.
"There was a child walking along the road just ahead, but she turned and saw us coming, and she disappeared in the most curious way; she seemed to melt into the weeds at the roadside, across from the elder-bush yonder." The judge pulled in the horses by the elder-bush.

"No child here, now," he said, "but you're right; there certainly was one, just before you spoke." The young corn was low in the fields, and there was no hiding-place in sight.
"I'm very superstitious; I am sure it was an imp," Miss Sherwood said.
"An imp or a very large chameleon; she was exactly the color of the road." "A Cross-Roads imp," said the judge, lifting the reins, "and in that case we might as well give up.

I never set up to be a match for those people, and the children are as mean as their fathers, and smarter." When the buckboard had rattled on a hundred yards or so, a little figure clad in a tattered cotton gown rose up from the weeds, not ten feet from where the judge had drawn rein, and continued its march down the road toward Plattville, capering in the dust and pursuing the buckboard with malignant gestures till the clatter of the horses was out of hearing, the vehicle out of sight.
Something over two hours later, as Mr.Martin was putting things to rights in his domain, the Dry-Goods Emporium, previous to his departure for the evening's gossip and checkers at the drug-store, he stumbled over something soft, lying on the floor behind a counter.

The thing rose, and would have evaded him, but he put out his hands and pinioned it and dragged it to the show-window where the light of the fading day defined his capture.