Sam took the matter of Mrs. Grant’s gratitude and the promised pie much
to heart. He was, as it happened, a sensitive fellow, and he was of
the age at which dread of ridicule is perhaps keenest. So he readily
imagined that the whole school was laughing at him and the picture he
must have presented with Mrs. Grant’s stout arm about his shoulders;
and made himself miserable by suspicion of amusement in every glance he
caught and of personal application in every laugh he heard.
He had been reasonably satisfied with the manner in which he had
stopped the runaway, and might not have objected to a certain amount
of publicity, provided it could have come in the right way. If some
man, who had been a witness of the affair, should have met him on the
street, and clapped him on the shoulder, and growled “Clever job you
did, youngster!” or “Good work, son!”--why, that would have been all
right, and quite in accord with his idea of the proprieties. But to be
hugged and patted, and promised a pie, with his club-mates and others
looking on, to say nothing of the principal--truly, Sam felt that his
was a hard and undeserved fate.
His behavior was somewhat like that of most stricken creatures; that
is, he sought solitude. He shunned the club. From school he went
straight home, and there, curled up in a corner of the library, read or
studied industriously. Even to his father and mother he said little,
and to neither did he confide a syllable of his unhappy experience.
This sort of thing went on for two or three days, with the natural
result that by much brooding upon his troubles he magnified them out of
all proportion, and made himself so genuinely miserable that, at last,
he was driven in desperation to seek diversion. He tried to find it at
the club, and again his luck was bad.
Trojan Walker had the gift of mimicry, and Herman Boyd liked to devise
little dramatic scenes. Sam walked in upon the assembled club, just in
time to behold the Trojan, with a shawl wrapped about him to increase
his resemblance to Mrs. Grant, presenting a lump of dough on a toy
pie-plate to Herman, to the extreme delectation of the spectators. Step
and Poke were roaring with laughter, and even the solemn Shark was
chuckling.
“Heroic youth, accept this slight trifle as a testimonial of my deep
and undying gratitude and affection,” the Trojan was reciting. “You
risked your life to save me, and now you can risk it again. This is no
common pie. It’s a--a--a----”
There the Trojan hesitated, stammered, paused. He had caught sight of
Sam, standing in the doorway; and something in the other’s face warned
him that he was on dangerous ground.
Oddly enough, it was the Shark who broke the silence, which for a
moment held the group.
“Come in and shut the door, Sam,” he said curtly. “You’re making a
draught.”
But Sam neither closed the door nor advanced into the room. Instead,
he held his position, glancing from one to another of his chums. Poke
laughed nervously; Step fell to rubbing his jaw with a quaint air of
perplexity. The Trojan and Herman instinctively fell back a pace, as if
expecting attack. Sam’s face was white, but his eyes were blazing.
There was another pause, which seemed very long to all the boys,
watching the newcomer, and perceiving more or less clearly that he was
having a hard fight to keep his self-control. Then, of a sudden, Sam
turned on his heel, and strode out, slamming the door behind him, and
leaving a party no longer in a mood for private theatricals.
The Trojan cast his shawl into a corner; Herman dropped weakly into a
chair. Poke, staring at the door beyond which Sam had vanished, spoke
for all of them.
“Gee--minee!” he quavered. “But who’d ’a’ thought he’d take it as hard
as all that?”
Meanwhile Sam was hurrying along the street. When he came to his
father’s place, he turned in at the big gate, but instead of going to
the house marched to the barn. There in a combined harness room and
workshop he came upon Lon Gates, coachman, chauffeur, gardener and
general factotum of the Parker household, and also often counsellor and
sometimes consoler of its youngest member.
A glance showed Lon that Sam was flying storm signals. Out of the
corner of an eye he watched the boy, who had dropped upon a bench near
the little stove. A full minute passed before either spoke.
“Well?” Lon drawled, finally.
Sam made no reply, but stared industriously at his shoes.
Lon went on with his work--he was repairing a harness. He fitted a new
buckle in place of an old one; tested it; glanced again at his young
friend.
“I dunno, Sam, but you’d feel better if you got it out of your system,”
he remarked leisurely.
No response from the youth on the bench.
Lon continued his task for a time. Then he began to whistle. Sam
stirred uneasily.
“What’s the matter? Out o’ tune, am I?” Lon inquired.
“Way out!” snapped the boy.
Then Lon laughed. “Ha, ha! Must ’a’ ketched it off you, son. What’s the
trouble, anyhow?”
“Noth--nothing.”
“All right--tell me about it.”
Sam raised his head. “Oh, it’s nothing--nothing to talk about, that is.”
“Well,” said Lon meditatively, “it pays to experiment now and then.
You never can tell ’bout some things. And there is sort of a relief,
somehow, in usin’ the human voice--kinder safety-valve effect. And it
looks to me as if you’d been bottlin’ up steam long enough.... T’other
boys been rilin’ you, did you say?”
“Yes--but I didn’t say so.”
Lon waved a hand. “Well, now you’re started, go ahead. I’m listenin’.”
Sam hesitated. “It--it’s a long story.”
“What’s the odds? It’s a long time before we have to knock off for
supper.”
“Oh, I couldn’t tell you everything.”
“Couldn’t, eh? That club o’ yourn in it?”
“Hang the club!” cried Sam hotly. “I’ll never go there again!”
Lon shook his head. “All right, maybe, only--only what do you fellers
call yourselves? Beats all how I forget names!”
“It’s the Safety First Club.”
“Why, so it is! And ‘Safety First’--that’s your motto, ain’t it? Good
’un, at that! It’ll keep you out of lots of mix-ups by makin’ you stop
to think twice before you do things or say things you’ll be sorry for.”
The red crept into Sam’s face. “Oh, well, Lon,” he said, “maybe I’ll go
there again some time. But I wouldn’t now--you couldn’t hire me to. The
way that crowd treated me----”
“Hold on! All the crowd?”
Sam reflected briefly. “Orkney wasn’t there,” he admitted. “But he’d
have been as bad as the rest.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” Lon advised. “That Orkney boy thinks a
heap of you, Sam--all the more, likely’s not, ’cause you’re kinder an
acquired taste with him. Mind how you two started to scrap, and how you
misjudged each other, and how he ran away, and how you was mighty glad
to have a hand in bringin’ him back? And----”
Sam stopped him. “Lon, that’s all true. But that’s another story. This
one’s about me, and I--well, I’m the goat. And for that crowd to keep
bringing up to me how that woman grabbed me, and told me she’d give me
a mince pie--but say! I didn’t mean to tell you.”
“I know you didn’t,” said Lon calmly. “But now you might as well go
ahead, and fill in the blanks in the yarn.”
Sam drew a long breath. It would be a relief to have a confidant, and
he trusted Lon’s discretion.
“Well, I’ll tell you--tell you the whole thing,” he said, and plunged
into the narrative, beginning with his dash for the head of Mrs.
Grant’s runaway horse, and continuing through the scene at the school
and the interrupted performance at the Safety First Club.
Lon listened with admirable gravity. He understood perfectly Sam’s
frame of mind.
“Jesso, jesso!” he remarked sagely, when the tale was told. “Riled you
all up, Sam, didn’t it? But I dunno’s there’s anything real fatal about
it. The Grants are mighty nice folks--I know ’em. Fine place they’ve
got over to Sugar Valley, too. And Mis’ Grant--she meant all right,
only she didn’t realize, mebbe, that a boy’s more or less like a rabbit
when it comes to public pettin’, and behaves accordin’. So, if you’d
cut and run----”
“I couldn’t,” Sam explained hotly.
“Good thing you couldn’t. Same way when Mis’ Grant makes good with that
mince pie----”
There Sam’s wrath exploded. He raged for a moment or two, Lon listening
patiently.
“Well, it’ll be some mince pie,” he said at last, when the boy had
paused for lack of breath. “If I was you, I wouldn’t be declinin’ it
ahead o’ time and sight unseen. You can never tell, you know, how the
thing may strike you when it happens. Maybe you’ll be hungry, and maybe
you’ll feel like treatin’ that club of yours----”
“No--no, siree! I’m through with ’em!” Sam managed to gasp.
“Umph! Not flocking with ’em much, eh?”
“You bet not! Not after the way they ragged me!”
Lon meditated briefly. “Sam,” he said, “you’re an amazin’ human
critter. Fust and last, you have got a power o’ human ways about you.
And I reckon most every human with any spunk one time or another makes
up his mind the whole world’s against him, and starts in to fight it.
So he tries to kick the world ’round for a while, and likely’s not
keeps it up until he notices that he’s stubbed his toe and the world
ain’t takin’ any interest to speak of.”
“Huh!”
Lon chuckled softly. “Te he! Say! Wonder if I ever told you about old
Brodman.”
There was a little pause. Then Sam said, “Guess not.” He spoke half
curiously, half unwillingly.
“Well, old Brodman was a pretty decent citizen--all right in his way.
But he was jest as human as you, Sam. So it happened once he got to
figgerin’ that the town was down on him and treatin’ him mean. ‘I’ll
get even with ’em,’ he says to himself; ‘I’ll have nothin’ to do with
’em.’ So off he goes, and flocks all by himself for a good, long spell.
At last, though, it gets sorter tiresome, and back he trots, and runs
smack into one of his old neighbors. ‘Hello!’ says the neighbor,
casual like. ‘How do you do?’ says old Brodman, all dignified. The
neighbor yawns and looks at the sky. ‘Kinder threatenin’ rain, ain’t
it?’ says he. Old Brodman glares at him. ‘Look here!’ says he, ‘don’t
you and all the rest of the town know I’ve been away? Hain’t ye missed
me?’ ‘Wal, I wouldn’t exactly call it “missed,”’ says the neighbor.
‘You see, Brodman, ’most everybody thought you was in jail.’”
Sam sprang to his feet. He crossed the room to a window, through which
he stared industriously.
“If you’d like to have the moral o’ that story,” Lon went on, “it’s
that one human can’t buck all the rest. The odds are too big. What’s a
ton to him ain’t a featherweight to the world. And applyin’ that moral
to a case nearer home, I’d say you’d better make up your mind to go
back to your crowd, and grin and bear it. And the more you grin, the
less you’ll have to bear.”
[Illustration: “GRIN AND BEAR IT”]
“I won’t do it.”
“Umph! Safety First! Ain’t that your motto?”
“It doesn’t apply here.”
“’Deed it does! Don’t let your notions get twisted.”
Sam continued to stare out of the window. “You’re asking too much, Lon.
I can’t stand being a butt for a lot of fool jokes--I won’t stand it!”
“What’ll you do? Turn hermit?”
“Why--why, no.”
Lon resumed his work. There was a long pause before he spoke.
“Sam, you take my advice. You’ve been mopin’ around the place for
two-three days. Get out and stretch your legs. Take a big tramp--a
reg’lar hike. Wonderful what a lot of brain fog you can walk away from
if you walk far enough.”
Sam shook his head. “No fun in that. It’s beginning to snow, too.”
“Well, go to-morrow, then. A fresh fall will make crackin’ good
snow-shoein’.”
“No fun going alone.”
Lon grinned. “Son, I guess, after all, that story about old Brodman did
sink in.”
“Huh! Don’t think it’s much of a story,” Sam growled, and moved toward
the door.
“That depends,” Lon called after him. “A story’s like a crowbar--makes
all the difference in the world whether you use it right or wrong.”