To all seeming, there always had been a Catie in Scott Brenton's life,
always had been a Catie for him to seek in seasons of domestic stress
or discipline. Indeed, his first memory of her was inextricably mingled
with the recollections of an early spanking. Scott was naturally a good
child, and Mrs. Brenton, as a rule, spanked cunningly, but very seldom.
Now and then, she felt that circumstances justified the deed.
Scott, seven years old and inventive withal, had been locked up in the
house alone, one day, while his mother went to a particularly
attractive funeral with carriages enough for even the outside circle of
the mourners. One such mourner failing, she had been bidden to the
vacant seat in the rearmost carriage, and her absence had been
prolonged unduly. She came home, expecting to find Scott wailing loudly
for his missing mother. Instead, she found him playing camp-out Indian,
as he called it, with her best bed by way of wickiup, and the wickiup
was provisioned lavishly and stickily from the resources of the closet
where she kept her jams.
Prudence and frugality demanded that Mrs. Brenton should remove her
best clothes, before she essayed to administer justice at short range.
Scott, left to himself, played on contentedly the while, until his camp
was rudely invaded by a foe clad in a second-best petticoat and a
shoulder shawl, and armed with a slipper which had seen better days.
Even then, prudence cried out for yet another delay, for the young
Indian was carrying so much of his commissariat upon his person that it
seemed wise to wash him, before she proceeded to the spanking. Mrs.
Brenton's point of view, moreover, was decidedly old-fashioned. Instead
of rejoicing at this fresh manifestation of her boy's imagination, she
concentrated all her remarks upon what she termed his theft, and she
frugally used the period while she was scrubbing him, to drive her
spoken condemnations home. Accordingly, it was a long, long time of
duplex agony before the spanking finally achieved itself, and Scott,
clean, but tingling from the slipper's impact, was told to go out and
sit down on the doorstep and think over what a bad, bad boy he had
been.
Like Alexander the Less, he found the doorstep distinctly cooling to
his fevered person, and he sat there contentedly enough, while he gave
himself over to the luxury of bubbly sobs and of digging his fists into
his weeping eyes. So absorbed was he in this soothing occupation that
he paid no heed to the patter of approaching footsteps, until a voice
fell on his ears.
"Cry-baby!" the voice chirped, in the high key which, to the youthful
mind, is expressive of disdain. And then it added even more
disdainfully, "Dirty-face!"
Dazed by this two-fold attack upon him, Scott took down his smudgy
fists and displayed to the intruder's view his smudgy countenance. An
older pair of eyes might easily have discovered cause for wonder that,
in so short a time since his scrubbing, so great a quantity of mother
earth could have found its way upward to mingle with his tears and form
the dust that grimed his face. Despite his tears and his grime,
however, Scott's manly temper roused itself to face his critic.
"I ain't!" he bellowed hotly at the air around him, without troubling
himself to look to see whence the strange voice had come.
The voice reflected somewhat of his opposition.
"You are, too. What's on your face?"
"Blackberry jam and soap," Scott answered, with a craftiness beyond his
years. He told the literal truth, but not all the truth. No need to
inform this critical stranger what was the crust that lay on top of
all.
The critical stranger removed her pink countenance from the crack
between the front-fence pickets, and pushed the gate open just a very
little way. Seen through the larger crack, she stood revealed to Scott,
a slim little damsel of perhaps six years, her pink calico frock
starched until it stood out stiffly above her knees, and her topmost
curl tied up with a mammoth bow of green gauze ribbon, obviously culled
from some box of ancestral finery. She was a pretty child; but, even at
that tender age, the decision of her little mouth and chin was too
pronounced, the lift of her small head a trifle too self-satisfied.
"What's the matter, cry-baby?" she inquired, as Scott's interest in her
appearing was punctuated with a fresh gulp of woe.
"I've been spanked."
The critical light faded from her eyes, to be replaced by another
light, this time of interest.
"What for?"
"I was playing Indian in mother's jam."
Most damsels of that age would have asked for further particulars.
Instead,--
"Hh!" she sniffed, and the sniff spoke volumes as to the quality of her
young imagination.
Scott felt it lay upon him to defend himself from all which the sniff
implied.
"'Twas fun, too," he asserted suddenly, as, with a final wipe of his
fist across his eyes, he dismissed the outward traces of his grief.
"You get things to eat to take with you, and the bed's the camp, and
you live there for years and always, all alone. And then they smell the
things you're eating and--"
"Who's they?" the small girl demanded.
"Oh, wolves and Indians and things, and they come around and growl
awfully. But you aren't afraid. You take your gun, and crawl in under
the blankets and go on eating, sure they won't come in after you--"
"What do you eat?"