"Snake meat."
"Hh!" Again there came the sniff. "Snakes don't have meat. They only
wiggle."
Scott glared at her, during a moment of speechless hostility. Then
suddenly he fired upon her with what was to be the favourite weapon of
his later life.
"Prove it!" he ordered her defiantly.
But his defiance fell upon a surface quite impenetrable to its shaft.
"Sha'n't!"
"'Fraid cat!" he retorted curtly.
"Ain't!"
And then, for a short while, there was a silence. Out of the corner of
her eye, the little girl was watching Scott. Scott, his head
ostentatiously averted, was gazing at something he had dug up out of
his trouser pocket, something concealed within the curve of his smudgy
hand. Young as he was, his theories did not fail him. The silence
prolonged itself for minutes which seemed to them both like hours. Then
the eternal feminine yielded to the sting of curiosity.
"What you got?" she asked him, as the gate swung open just a little
wider.
Scott was too canny to yield one whit of his advantage. His hand shut
into a fist.
"That's telling."
The gate swung open wider yet, and the small girl marched through the
opening.
"Tell me," she said imperiously. "I want to see it."
Scott still held himself aloof, still held his trophy concealed from
her curious eyes. She tried to grasp his hand, missed it, then
succeeded. Then she tried to pry open the tight-shut fingers.
"Show me!" she ordered.
He shook his head, smiling derisively at her, while her strong little
fingers did their best to pluck open his hard little fist.
Without another word, she bent above his hand. An instant later, the
hand flew open, and the ball of the opening thumb showed the prints of
small, sharp teeth.
"What is it?" she asked once more.
Scott's voice dropped to a murmur which was charged with mystery.
"It's a back tooth of the whale that swallowed Jonah."
Instantly she struck his hand a blow that sent his trophy flying off
into the thick grass beside the step.
"It is not," she said shrilly. "It's nothing but a dirty old chicken
bone, so there!"
And then, to the unspeakable astonishment of Scott, she seated herself
upon the bottom step, smoothed her calico skirt across her little
knees, and prepared to await further developments in tranquil comfort.
It was thus that Scott Brenton first learned the lesson that the
feminine mind only gains the fullest comfort in having the last word,
when it is able to sit by and watch that word sink in and be digested.
Later on in his life, the lesson was repeated again and again, with an
increasing list of corollaries. Oddly enough, too, it was always given
to him by the selfsame teacher, sometimes with mildness, sometimes with
spiritual floggings.
This time, however, she appeared to be contented with the form her
teaching had taken, contented, too, with its effect upon himself.
Accordingly, she made no effort to continue the discussion. She merely
sat there, silent, in the place whence she had ousted him, and gloated
on her victory, sure that in time his masculine impatience would lead
him to break in upon the pause.
She knew her man.
"What's your name?" Scott asked her curtly, after an interval of
digging one heel and then the other into the turf beside the step.
"Catie."
"Catie what?"
"Catie Harrison."
"Huuh!"
She scented criticism in his reply.
"It's better than yours is," she retorted.
"It is not, too," he made counter retort. "Besides, you don't know my
name."
Slowly the little damsel nodded, once, twice.
"Yes, I do. The man told me."
"What man?"
"The man that sells hens' eggs to my mother. I asked him, and he told
me."
Scott eyed her with fierce hostility. Was there no limit to this small
girl's all-penetrating curiosity?
"What is it, then?" he asked defiantly.
"It's Walter Scott Brenton," she assured him. And then she added, by
way of turning her triumph into a crushing rout, "I think it's the
homeliest name I ever heard."
And once again Scott Brenton gritted his teeth upon the fact that he
was downed.
Later, he took his turn for extracting information concerning his
uninvited guest. He extracted it from herself, however, and with
refreshing directness. At the advanced age of seven years, one sees no
especial use in conventional beatings about the bush. One goes straight
to the point, or else one keeps still entirely; and, at that phase of
his existence, keeping still was not Scott Brenton's forte. Indeed, he
was later than are the most of us in learning the lesson that the
keenest social weapon lies in reticence.
The starchy little damsel, it appeared, was the daughter of a petty
farmer, lately come into the village. She was an only child; her home
was the third house up the street, and her mother, busy about her
household tasks and already a good deal under the thumb of her small
daughter, considered her whole maternal duty done when the child was
washed and curled and clothed in starch, and then turned out to play.
Catie was able to look out for herself, Catie's mother explained
contentedly to her new neighbours, and she knew enough to come home,
when she was hungry. Best let her go her ways, then. She would learn to
be a little woman, all the sooner; and, in the meantime, it was a great
deal easier to do the housework without having a child under foot about
the kitchen.
And go her ways the little damsel did, with only her guardian angel to
see to it that her way was not the wrong one. By the time her father's
first week's rent was due, Catie had made acquaintance with every
inhabitant of the village, from the Methodist minister down to the
blacksmith's bob-tailed cat. Not only that; but Catie, by dint of many
questions, had discovered why the Methodist minister's wife was buried
in the churchyard with a slice of marble set up on top of her, and why
the blacksmith's bob-tailed cat lacked the major portion of her left
ear. If ever there was a gossip in the making, it was Catie Harrison.
More than that, her accumulated gossip was sorted out and held in
reserve, ready to be applied to any end that suited her small
convenience. Scott Brenton found that fact out to his cost, when the
story of his camp and his subsequent spanking came back upon him by way
of the man that sold the hens' eggs, in retaliation for his refusal to
ask that he himself and Catie should be allowed to have a ride in the
egg-man's wagon. Catie might be but six years and nine months old; but
already her infant brain had fathomed the theory of effectual relation
between the crime and the punishment. Her ideal Gehenna would be made
up of countless little assorted hells, not of one vast and
indiscriminate lake of flaming brimstone. Perchance this very fact had
its own due share of influence upon the later theology of Scott
Brenton.
That there would be influence, no one who watched the children could
deny. After the first day's squabbles, perhaps even on account of them,
they became inseparable. When they were not together, either Catie was
looking for Scott, or Scott for Catie, save upon the too frequent
occasions when discipline fell upon the two of them simultaneously and
forced them into a temporary captivity. When they were held apart, they
spent their time planning up new things to do together, once the
parental ban was off their intercourse. When they were together, it was
Scott who supplied the imagination for the pair of them. Catie's share
lay in the crafty outworking of the plan. When their plans came to
disaster, as often happened by reason of the boldness of Scott's young
conceptions, Catie took the disappointment with the temper of a little
vixen, kicked against the pricks and openly defied the Powers that Be.
Scott, on the other hand, shut his teeth and accepted the penalty,
already intent upon the question as to what he should undertake another
time.
And so the days wore on. To the adult mind, they would have seemed to
pass monotonously. The quicker child perceptions, though, the
magnifying point of view that makes a mountain out of every mole hill,
caused them to seem charged with an infinite amount of variety and
incident, full of enthusiastic dreams and thrills, and of crushing
disappointments which, however, never completely ended hope. Scott's
heritage from the long line of Parson Wheelers would have made him
stick to the belief that two and two must always equal four, had it not
been for that other heritage which kept him always hoping that some day
or other it might equal five. Already, he was starting on a life-long
quest for that same five, and Catie, nothing loath, went questing by
his side. Catie, though, went out of the merest curiosity, and her
invariable "I told you so" added the final, the most poignant sting to
all of Scott's worst disappointments. At the mature age of six or
seven, Catie Harrison showed quite plainly that no mere longing for a
possible ideal would ever lure her from the path of practical
expediency. She walked slowly, steadily ahead, while her boy companion
leaped to and fro about her, chasing first one bright butterfly of the
imagination and then another, only to clutch them and bring them back
to her to be viewed relentlessly with prosaic eyes which saw only the
spots where his impatient touch had rubbed away the downy bloom.
And so the months rolled past them both, Catie the young materialist
and potential tyrant, and Scott Brenton the idealist. The years carried
the children out of the perpetual holidays of infancy and into the
treadmill of schooling that begins with b, a, ba and sometimes never
ends. Side by side, the two small youngsters entered the low doorway of
the primary school; side by side, a few years later, a pair of lanky
striplings, they were plodding through their intermediate studies which
seemed to them unending. Catie was eagerly looking towards the final
pages of her geography and grammar, for beyond them lay the entrance to
another perpetual holiday, this time of budding maturity. Scott's eyes
were also on the finish, but for a different reason. His mother, one
night a week before his fourteenth birthday, had talked to him of
college, of his grandfather, the final Parson Wheeler of the line, and,
vaguely, of certain ambitions which had sprung up within her heart, the
morning she had listened to the birth-cry of her baby boy.
A week later, she had given him his grandfather's great gold pen,
albeit with plentiful instructions to the effect that he was not to use
it, but to keep it in its box, untarnished, until such time as he was
fitted to employ it in writing sermons of his own. Scott had received
the gift with veneration, and then quite promptly had summoned Catie to
do reverence at the selfsame shrine. But Catie had rebelled.
"Fudge!" she had said crisply. "What's the sense of having a useful
thing like that, that you can't use?"