Miss Morgan laughed with relief until she felt her hair was coming loose on the back of her head. “You mean –
you mean – gnomes?”
Tularecito nodded.
“What do you want to know about them?”
“I never saw any,” said Tularecito. His voice neither rose nor fell, but continued on one low note.
“Why, few people do see them, I think.”
“But I knew about them.”
Miss Morgan’s eyes squinted with interest. “You did? Who told you about them?”
“Nobody.”
“You never saw them, and no one told you? How could you know about them then?”
“I just knew. Heard them, maybe. I knew them in the book all right.”
Miss Morgan thought: “Why should I deny gnomes to this queer unfinished child? Wouldn’t his life be richer and
happier if he did believe in them? And what harm could it possibly do?”
“Have you ever looked for them?” she asked.
“No, I never looked. I just knew. But I will look now.”
Miss Morgan found herself charmed with the situation. Here was paper on which to write, here was a cliff on
which to carve. She could carve a lovely story that would be far more real than a book story ever could. “Where will you
look?” she asked.
“I’ll dig holes,” said Tularecito soberly.
“But the gnomes only come out at night, Tularecito. You must watch for them in the night. And you must come
and tell me if you find any. Will you do that?”
“I’ll come,” he agreed.
She left him staring after her. All the way home, she pictured him searching in the night. The picture pleased her.
He might even find the gnomes, might live with them and talk to them. With a few suggestive words, she had been able
to make his life unreal and very wonderful, and separated from the stupid lives about him. She deeply envied him his
searching.
In the evening, Tularecito put on his coat and took up a shovel. Old Pancho came upon him as he was leaving the
tool shed, “Where goest thou, Little Frog?” he asked.
Tularecito shifted his feet restlessly at the delay. “I go out into the dark. Is that a new thing?”
“But why takest thou the shovel? Is there gold, perhaps?”
The boy’s face grew hard with the seriousness of his purpose. “I go to dig for the little people who live in the
earth.”
Now Pancho was filled with horrified excitement. “Do not go, Little Frog! Listen to your old friend, your father
in God, and do not go! Out in the sage I found thee and saved thee from the devil, thy relatives. Thou art a little brother
of Jesus now. Go not back to thine own people! Listen to an old man, Little Frog!”
Tularecito stared hard at the ground and drilled his old thoughts with his new information. “Thou hast said they
are my people,” he exclaimed. “I am not like the others at the school or here. I know that. I have loneliness for my
people who live deep in the cool earth. When I pass a squirrel hole, I wish to crawl into it and hide myself. My own
people are like me, and they have called me. I must go home to them, Pancho.”
Pancho stepped back and held up crossed fingers. “Go back to the devil, thy father, then. I am not good enough
to fight this evil. It would take a saint. But see! At least I make the sign against thee and against all thy race.” He drew
the cross of protection in the air in front of him.
Tularecito smiled sadly, and turning, trudged off into the hills.
The heart of Tularecito gushed with joy at his homecoming. All of his life he had been an alien, a lonely outcast,
and now he was going home. As always, he heard the voices of the earth – the far-off clang of cow bells, the muttering of
disturbed quail, the little whine of a coyote who would not sing this night, the nocturnes of a million insects. But
Tularecito was listening for another sound, the movement of two-footed creatures, and the hushed voices of the hidden
people.
Once he stopped and called, “My father, I have come home,” and he heard no answer. Into squirrel holes he
whispered, “Where are you, my people? It is only Tularecito come home.” But there was no reply. Worse, he had no
feeling that the gnomes were near. He knew that a doe and fawn were feeding near him; he knew a wildcat was stalking a
rabbit behind a bush, although he could not see them, but from the gnomes he had no message.
A sugar-moon arose out of the hills.
“Now the animals will come out to feed,” Tularecito said in the papery whisper of the half witless. “Now the
people will come out, too.”
Pdf downloaded from http://www.thepdfportal.com/tularecito_92099.pdf
The brush stopped at the edge of a little valley and an orchard took its place. The trees were thick with leaves,
and the land finely cultivated. It was Bert Munroe’s orchard. Often, when the land was deserted and ghost-ridden,
Tularecito had come here in the night to lie on the ground under the trees and pick the stars with gentle fingers.
The moment he walked into the orchard, he knew he was nearing home. He could not hear them, but he knew the
gnomes were near. Over and over he called to them, but they did not come.
“Perhaps they do not like the moonlight,” he said.
At the foot of a large peach tree, he dug his hole – three feet across and very deep. All night he worked on it,
stopping to listen awhile and then digging deeper and deeper into the cool earth. Although he heard nothing, he was
positive that he was nearing them. Only when the daylight came did he give up and retire into the bushes to sleep.
In midmorning, Bert Munroe walked out to look at a coyote trap and found the hole at the foot of the tree. “What
the devil!” he said. “Some kids must have been digging a tunnel. That’s dangerous! It’ll cave in on them, or somebody
will fall into it and get hurt.” He walked back to the house, got a shovel, and filled up the hole.
“Manny,” he said to his youngest boy, “you haven’t been digging in the orchard, have you?”
“Uh-uh!” said Manny.
“Well, do you know who has?”
“Uh-uh!” said Manny.
“Well, somebody dug a deep hole out there. It’s dangerous. You tell the boys not to dig or they’ll get caved in.”
The dark came and Tularecito walked out of the brush to dig in his hole again. When he found it filled up, he
growled savagely, but then his thought changed and he laughed. “The people were here,” he said happily. “They didn’t
know who it was, and they were frightened. They filled up the hole the way a gopher does. This time I’ll hide, and when
they come to fill the hole, I’ll tell them who I am. Then they will love me.”
And Tularecito dug out the hole and made it much deeper than before, because much of the dirt was loose. Just
before daylight, he retired into the brush at the edge of the orchard and lay down to watch.
Bert Munroe walked out before breakfast to look at his trap again, and again he found the open hole. “The little
devils!” he cried. “They’re keeping it up, are they? I’ll bet Manny is in it after all.”
He studied the hole for a moment and then began to push dirt into it with the side of his foot. A savage growl
spun him around. Tularecito came charging down upon him, leaping like a frog on his long legs, and swinging his shovel
like a club.
When Jimmie Munroe came to call his father to breakfast, he found him lying on the pile of dirt. He was bleeding
at the mouth and forehead. Shovelfuls of dirt came flying out of the pit.
Jimmie thought someone had killed his father and was getting ready to bury him. He ran home in a frenzy of
terror, and by telephone summoned a band of neighbors.
Half a dozen men crept up on the pit. Tularecito struggled like a wounded lion, and held his own until they struck
him on the head with his own shovel. Then they tied him up and took him in to jail.
In Salinas, a medical board examined the boy. When the doctors asked him questions, he smiled blandly at them
and did not answer. Franklin Gomez told the board what he knew and asked the custody of him.
“We really can’t do it, Mr. Gomez,” the judge said finally. “You say he is a good boy. Just yesterday, he tried to
kill a man. You must see that we cannot let him go loose. Sooner or later he will succeed in killing someone.”
After a short deliberation, he committed Tularecito to the asylum for the criminal insane