Tom Reid, who was scarcely regarded as a boy now, so nearly grown was
he, went up to Hen Little, and catching him by the shoulder and shaking
him, said:
"It seems to me you pick out your boy to bully. You ought to be ashamed
of yourself, to hit a fellow under your size and not half your strength,
and I've a notion to thrash you for it myself."
Nobody heard what Hen Little replied, because all the boys were talking
at once now; but somehow, when Vic Whitney rose from the ground, his
clothes torn, his nose bleeding, and his books muddy, everybody saw that
he was going to say something, and everybody listened. What he said was
this:
"Hen Little, I've borne with you for two years; I've taken all your
meannesses as mere teasing, and I've thought you only a little rough;
but now I tell you you're a coward and a bully, and I give you warning
that I'll whip you for this day's work, if it's ten years hence."
"Boys," said Tom Reid, "I move that, as students of this High School, we
hereby exclude Hen Little from all our games and sports, and regard him
as an outside barbarian, until he makes a proper apology to Vic Whitney
for what he has done."
"Second the motion!" cried a dozen voices, while all the girls clapped
their hands.
"Wait a minute, please," called Vic; "don't put that motion, Tom. Let me
say a word. I thank you all for your sympathy, but I beg you not to do
what you're doing. I've made this matter a quarrel now, and it's my
quarrel, not yours. I've told Hen Little that I shall whip him for this,
and I shall do it, you may depend. But that ought to settle it, so far
as you are concerned. Hen is bigger than I am, and much stronger; but I
shall thrash him in due time, and it ain't fair to punish him twice for
one offense. If you punish him, I can't, without doing an injustice, and
I don't want to do that. Please withdraw your motion, Tom."
"But this sort of thing is a disgrace to the school," said Tom.
"Very well; but I am going to punish it myself," replied Vic, "and that
will clear the school. I've a right to be the one to do it."
"But you can't thrash Hen Little," cried half a dozen boys in a breath.
"No, not now. But I shall be able to do it after a while. Trust me, and
do me the favor I have asked. Withdraw your motion, and treat Hen as if
nothing had happened, and I'll take care of the rest."
There was something in Vic's manner which awed the boys into respectful
obedience. They were outraged with Hen Little, and would have enjoyed
"making the school too hot for him," but they obeyed Vic Whitney. When
Vic had secured their promise to this effect, he gathered up his books
and walked away toward his home.
Little had teased him mercilessly during the whole of the two years
since they both entered the High School, but Vic had borne it all as
mere teasing, not to be resented. At the end of the last term, however,
Vic had successfully offered himself for examination with the class in
advance of his own, having worked of nights to get ahead, and in this
way he had distanced his own class, and made himself a sort of hero in
the school. At the same examination Hen Little had failed to pass with
the class, and his mortification took the form of hatred of his former
classmate, who had succeeded in making two steps forward while he failed
to make one. His teasing became positive persecution, but Vic continued
to endure it with a smiling face.
One day, however, just after school, as Vic was starting toward home,
with his books under his arm, he accidentally passed too near a
gymnasium rope on which Hen Little was swinging. A slight collision was
the result, and Hen lost his hold on the rope, with no more serious
consequence than a fall to his knees. Springing up, he rushed at Vic,
and without a word of warning, dealt him a severe blow on the nose,
knocking him down into a little puddle. It was a particularly brutal and
wanton attack, and so, as I began by saying, all the boys cried,
"Shame!" and the scene already described ensued.
Vic Whitney seemed calm enough when he begged the boys to refrain from
their proposed measure of vengeance, but as he walked away homeward he
was in reality very much disturbed. His sense of justice was outraged
beyond endurance, and his feeling was that he would wrong himself if he
failed to administer the punishment he had promised Hen Little.
If Vic could have concealed the affair from his mother by saying nothing
about it, he would have done so; but that was impossible. The torn
clothing and the swollen nose required an explanation. When he had told
the story, and declared his purpose, his mother sought gently to calm
his spirit; but finding that impossible in his present mood, she quietly
dropped the matter, hoping at some later time to dissuade Vic from his
intention.
After supper Vic went out without saying where he was going. He walked
up the street, and entered the office of Dr. McCutcheon, his father's
life-long friend.
"Well, my boy," said the doctor, "what's the matter? Have you been
hurt?"
"No; it's nothing," said Vic; "and I didn't come for sticking-plasters
or poultices. I want your advice."
"You shall have it. What is the trouble?"
"I want you to tell me just how I should live, while developing my
muscles, in order that I may gain strength and activity as rapidly as
possible."
"What! going to make a prize-fighter of yourself? I thought you cared
more for triumphs won with your head."
"No, I'm not going to be a prize-fighter," replied Vic; "but I am going
to get up all the muscle there is in me, and I want to know about diet,
etc."
"Well," said the doctor, "perhaps you _are_ a trifle flabby for want of
exercise, and I'm not sure that you can do better than train a little.
As to diet, quit coffee and tea, eat plenty of roast beef and other
wholesome plain food, let pastry alone, and don't study just before or
just after a hearty meal; get ten hours' sleep in every twenty-four, if
you can; and it won't take much training to make you robust."
Clearly the doctor had no thought that Vic intended anything more than
to make himself robust and healthy; but Vic had secured the information
he wanted.
The next day he fitted up a number of gymnastic appliances in the cow
barn. He fastened ring ropes to the beams, and constructed some parallel
bars; he swung a ladder horizontally, and hung a bag of sand on a level
with his breast. Then his training began. When he got out of bed in the
morning he took a cold bath, and rubbed himself well with a coarse
towel. Then slipping on some light clothing, he went out and ran around
two or three blocks at a good round pace. On his return, after taking
breath, he swung by his hands on his ring ropes, drawing himself up
first with both hands, and then, after a week's practice, with one hand
at a time. The horizontal bars and the ladder came next, each furnishing
a variety of exercises for different muscles. Finally, Vic would stand
in front of his sand bag and strike it with his fists a great many
times.
At first these muscular exercises made him stiff and sore, but this
effect soon passed away, and day by day he increased the amount of
exercise taken. His muscles grew in size and hardened. Feats that had
been impossible to him at first, became easy, and the exercise which at
first seemed to exhaust him became positively delightful. Devising new
exercises and new apparatus every week, he presently found that he was
acquiring something besides strength--he was growing expert in all
manner of agile feats. He practiced trapeze performances, and rapidly
acquired an accuracy of eye, a steadiness of nerves, which made easy
and safe many cat-like feats, in which, if he had attempted them a few
weeks before, he must certainly have broken his neck.
His mother had anxiously watched his conduct; and one evening she seized
upon a favorable moment for remonstrance, seeking to dissuade him from
his purpose of vengeance. He heard her silently, and when she had done,
he replied, very calmly, but very resolutely:
"Mother, what you say is all true and right in principle. It is wrong to
cherish anger and to seek vengeance, but that isn't my case. I don't
hate Hen Little: I pity his meanness and his cowardice. I am not seeking
vengeance, but justice, and I have a right to that. If I were to give up
thrashing him, I should look at myself with contempt. I shall punish
him, not because I hate him--for I don't--but because I must assert my
own manhood."
The widow was perplexed by this view of the case. She could not quite
believe it was right, and yet she could not conscientiously say it was
wrong.
"Well, my son," she replied, "I fear you are wrong; but you may be
right. At any rate, I can not take the responsibility of urging you to
submit to anything that you feel to be a degradation. Feeling as you do,
you must decide the matter for yourself."
"I have decided it," said Vic; "and the decision is that I must thrash
Hen Little."
Vic and his mother were sitting in the doorway during this conversation.
Vic had finished his lessons, and the hour was late, but the night was
so pleasant that the pair sat there chatting long after their usual
bed-time. Just as Vic ended the discussion with the remark quoted above,
the fire-bells rang out with that eager, noisy, frightened clangor which
fire-bells have only in small cities where a fire calls the whole
population forth. Vic seized his hat and ran, guided by the glare which
already appeared at the opposite end of the town.
The burning house was one of the largest in the little city, a building
three stories in height; and before the excited volunteer fire companies
could get a stream of water running, the fire was evidently beyond their
control. It had broken out in the lower story, near the stairway; and
finding that efforts to stay its course were idle, the firemen and
spectators did little more than place ladders at a second-story window
for the escape of the family, who had been sleeping. When all were out,
there was nothing to do but to stand and watch the bonfire, as no other
house was near enough to be in danger.
Presently a head appeared at one of the windows of the third story, and
a cry for help was heard. A shudder ran through the crowd, for there was
no help to be given. The fire had burned both the stairways, and there
was no ladder long enough to reach beyond the second story. Some of the
spectators stood stupefied; others ran about aimlessly, trying to do
something, but having no idea what.
Meantime the boy at the window cried aloud and piteously for help. His
father and mother were not less frantic than he. They had believed that
all the family were safely out, supposing that Hen--for it was Hen
Little--had passed down one flight from his third-story bedroom, and had
escaped with the rest. Seeing him now at the window, they lost their
wits, and cried to him to leap out, without thinking that to do so would
be instant death to him. Yet there was apparently nothing to be done,
and the situation was appalling. The crowd shuddered to think that the
boy, whom they all knew, must be burned to death there in their sight.
Presently a cry arose at the rear of the crowd, and Vic Whitney came
running with all his might, shouting:
"Don't jump, Hen! Stay where you are! Don't jump out!"
Vic had run to a neighboring house, and brought away a clothes-line.
"Has anybody a string?" he shouted--"a kite cord--anything--quick!"
A boy handed him a kite cord, and Vic quickly tied one end of it around
his own body. Then turning to Tom Reid, he said:
"Unwind fifty feet or so, break it off, and tie the end to this rope, so
that I can pull the rope up. Be quick."
Leaving Tom to execute this direction, Vic ran forward, stepped upon the
railing of the front steps, and grasping a window-shutter which luckily
was open, and therefore not in the blaze that licked its tongue out of
the window, he drew himself lightly up to its top, crying out as he did
so, "Play a stream of water on me."
The fireman obeyed, and none too soon, for all the clothing on Vic's
right side was scorching. From the top of this shutter Vic reached the
window-sill above, and disappeared in a dense cloud of black smoke. It
was for only a moment, however. Having his wits about him, he held his
breath to avoid suffocation, and quickly climbed to the top of the
window, and into the air again. Another moment, and he had grasped the
sill of the third-story window. A gust of wind blew a flame from below
right upon him. He felt his arms blister and his head swim. One second
more, and he must loosen his hold, and fall. The crowd below uttered a
moan of horror. The wind shifted instantly, however, and in spite of the
agony he suffered from the burns, Vic made a last effort, and drew
himself up to the window where Hen had stood. Hen was no longer there,
and the room was too full of smoke for Vic to see into it. He knew what
had happened. Hen had become unconscious from suffocation, and had
fallen on the floor by the window. Hastily drawing up the kite cord, to
which Tom Reid had fastened the end of the clothes-line, Vic soon had
the rope in his hand. Reaching down from the window-sill, he fastened
the line around Hen's body, and swung him out, the crowd below yelling
itself hoarse as he lowered away. A few seconds sufficed to let Hen down
to the ground, where the doctors took charge of him.
Meantime Vic had to think of saving himself. He fastened the rope at the
window, and was on the point of slipping down it, when a fierce flame
burst from the window immediately beneath, burning the rope off like a
thread, and cutting off all chance of escape in that direction.
Vic saw his extreme danger, but as he afterward said, his mind seemed to
be unnaturally calm and alert. There was fire below him, through which
it was impossible to pass, and the roof was in a blaze. But he
remembered that the lightning-rod of this house, instead of passing
straight to the earth, was carried down along the roof to the corner
nearest him, and thence down the corner to the ground. Seizing this
slender chance of life, he climbed to the top of the window, and grasped
the stout gutter pipe that ran along the eaves.
Swinging from this by his hands, he worked his way slowly and painfully
toward the corner, while the people below actually held their breath.
Whether the gutter would hold the boy's weight or not was terribly
uncertain, and the people stood on tiptoe, as if they could thereby
lessen the weight, and increase his small chance for life. Slowly he
worked along toward the corner, and at last his hand grasped the
friendly lightning-rod. A few seconds later he was safely on the ground,
but so badly burned that it was necessary to carry him home on a
shutter.
* * * * *
A week later, when Dr. McCutcheon pronounced Vic out of danger, a
company of his school-mates came to see him. They filed into his room,
and took their places in a sort of line. Then Hen Little entered, and
walking up to the bedside, he said:
"I've had my thrashing, Vic, and I've brought all the boys that were
present on that other day to hear me say so. I want to ask your pardon
for all I've done to you. I deserved punishment; now I've got it; and if
it ain't enough, you may thrash me with your fists as soon as you get
well, and I won't raise a finger." Then, turning to the boys, he said:
"Vic called me a coward that day when I abused him, and he was right. I
acted cowardly, and I want to say so to all of you. I'm thoroughly
ashamed of myself."
Vic held out his hand, which was bandaged almost to the finger-tips, and
said: "Hen, I take it all back. There isn't a cowardly bone in the body
of a boy who can apologize in that way for a fault. Let's be friends
hereafter."