[23] ... once I remember hearing Phil make a slurring reference to
what he called the stocking National Bank of old Rebba, which was
supposed to have helped retrieve the Milliken fortunes. He was sternly
rebuked by my father. In all the years of stress and strain which were
to follow this catastrophe, no member of our family was permitted to
refer at all, much less slightingly, to Mark Milliken. If my mother
rankled when she heard of the twenty-room house in Toronto, she rankled
silently. If my father owed the twist that had come into his face since
reverses due to the betrayal of a friend, he bore it silently. Probably
out of deference to Emma and Morton, who were to come in for bitter
times. And just as probably out of the fine, high pride that was part
of Father’s many-sided, but always inviolate personality.
[24] How well I remember a day in June, when David was about seven. A
bitter, heart-aching day, as days go. I was over helping Mother move
from the House on Sycamore Street. I can see us now. Emma, Mother, and
I, in and out among the boxes and chests of that priceless attic, so
filled with memories for us all, and Emma hot and blowy and perturbed.
Poor dear, it was to be the beginning of many a hot and perturbed year
for her. Mother full of tears. Davey, a squirrel in and out among
us. Here. There. In hamper. Out of trunk. Little nuisance. Suddenly,
pouncing upon an old gavel that had been presented to Henry by the High
School Debating Society. David leaped to the window, hammering with all
his might. “Listen, world!” he shouted—“listen here, world—out there—to
me!” and ’pon my soul, it suddenly seemed that through the drone of
that June afternoon, lowing with cattle, crowing with cocks, buzzing
with insects, there did descend a silence. Fantastic, of course, and
yet in the light of subsequent events—that child hammering his gavel
up in the little window that overlooked his universe, was not just any
child hammering his gavel for the world to heed him.
[25] It was about a six-month after the move to the Igrotte house that
my brother Dave, a quiet and rather thoughtful child up to then, asked
me a question that surprised me with its observation. There had been a
labor-strike among the men who were laying the new-paved road between
Centralia and Middleton, and one of the so-called scabs had been struck
by a rock thrown by a union man. When old Jessup told me of this
happening, I was salting out weeds between the bricks of a garden-walk.
Helping me at this task, Davey, digging away, looked up to remark, as
ants scurried from the path of his trowel, “Ants run their world better
for themselves than folks do, Bek. Bees too. Bees and ants all work
together. Why are folks always trying to crowd each other out?”
I sometimes wonder if right then and there was not planted into his
heart the unconscious resolve that much of his life-effort must be
waged against man’s inhumanity to man.
That day he was just a kid, faintly perturbed with his first awareness
of injustice....
[26] On his tour of the deserts of the world, in behalf of his
reclamation-theories, it was said of him that at noonday, when the
natives lay scattered about the tents like so many meal-sacks, he
remained at his desk throughout the siesta-period, reviewing in map and
diagram the morning’s observations.
Midsummer campaigns across desert-country in the close density
of sleeping cars, when members of his party succumbed to actual
prostration, were not to faze him, nor for that matter, the terrific
onslaught of mosquitoes the year of his famous Alaskan tour in behalf
of his long-sighted domestication and cultivation of the ovibos, when
the eyes of the dog-teams were literally bitten closed, and the motors
of the aeroplanes, as they left the ground, were clogged with these
pestiferous insects.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Sixteen_
The most radical changes seemed to come so imperceptibly, that within
the year it was as if there had never been a time when the spacious
front verandah of his sister Emma’s, at the far end of Sycamore Street,
had not been cluttered with boarders seated on round straw mats. A
Max Juss, overseer of the Tallahassee Tobacco Factory, his wife, and
two children. Old man Clotillo, a county-clerk. The Misses Breen,
Daisy and Sachet, milliners, with a shop in the Renchler Block, and
Miss de Lisle, who taught violin and guitar, a sign in Emma’s right
parlor-window to that effect.
Even the disintegration of the outward appearance of the house had been
too gradual to disturb the perception of youth, to whom years are long.
The scarred, nicked places on the verandah-paint, where before the
white and green had shone. Starchy lace curtains had become strings.
Weeds and dandelions had cropped up between the bricks of the sidewalk,
to say nothing of Emma’s once famous reception-hall, the first in
Centralia, now always agog-looking with boarders’ letters stuck into
its mirror.
In no time at all, it was as if Davey could not remember when his
sister’s house was not the rather derelict-looking affair with the
front shades all at cross-purposes and the Misses Breen’s handkerchiefs
drying against the window-panes.
Claire, who taught kindergarten, and frequently came home with her
tired, pretty hands filled with colored-paper mats and putty pigs, used
to spruce bravely, after school hours, at the littered rooms, with
the dining-table always half-set now, Mr. Juss’s bottle of iron-tonic
and Miss Sachet’s box of Kay’s Komplaint Pills huddling around the
catsup-bottle. But it was not much help to putter. The Millikens’ was
an out-and-out boarding-house now. Emma served five prunes to the dish,
and the sign over the bathtub read: “Please scour. Do unto others as
you would wish to be done by.”
Poor Emma. It was hard to be a Milliken and a Schuyler. Morton’s mouth
was bitter with it, too. The name of his father or of his brother never
left his lips. Secretly, he wrote occasionally to his mother. After a
while, what was practically inevitable happened. Morton, whose business
connections had been solely with his father, lost his position as agent
with a local realty company, and then one that Henry procured for him
as collector for the Ice and Coal Company. Not through anything more
than just mild inability. Gradually, Morton became just a putterer
around home. Oiling locks. Mending rugs, fences, china, rain-spouts and
pocket-book clasps. A handy-man-about-the-house. The Schuylers quailed
over that; and as he lost subsequent position after position, just of
mild inability, every time, they became extra nice to him. Emma most
of all, who meticulously ended all household disputes and difficulties
with boarders by stating that she would talk the matter over with “Mr.
Milliken.” As a matter of fact, Mr. Milliken, as time marched on, could
more and more frequently be found sitting in a basement room that had
been fitted up as office, whittling on the wooden toys that Claire had
brought home from the kindergarten, for some mysterious reason known
only to himself, whiling away his time by making them leaner.
The change at Bek’s had come perhaps as more of a shock; and yet, in
some ways, it had probably the least perceptible change of all.
Bek still strode the farm somewhat terrifically, with her skirts
tucked into her boots. The perfection of cattle still stood in rows in
her model barns of asphalt gutters, running water, and electric light.
The clean-clipped acreage of yellow mustard, alfalfa, and grazing-land,
scattered with salt-rock, silos, red roofs, stone hedges, flowed out to
the horizon.
Winslow still smoked his pipe on the side porch and sketched his
afternoons away down in the lower meadow. Steve strode about the farm
now, doing such solitary odd jobs as breaking a colt or drilling for
artesian water.
The great difference that was not on the surface was what changed the
aspect of Bek’s farm so that about the entire place there was the
feeling of something having died.
A dream had died.
Ex-Governor Howey now owned the Bek Renchler place. For the modicum
of one hundred dollars a month, Bek remained on the farm as overseer,
occupying the house as formerly, except during September and sometimes
part of October, when the Warrington Howeys, from Washington, came on
for their annual visit.
Then Bek and the family moved into the rooms over the garage. They were
four, firm, square, bright rooms, with running water and clean new
paper and yellow floors.
The Howeys were extremely nice about this, and urged Bek and her little
brood to remain in the left wing of the house.
This Bek refused to do. The Howeys and Schuylers had never been on
that sort of social plane. The Howey girls had been away in the East
at school while the Schuyler girls were growing up. The Howey boys had
been scattered since their days of Military Academy. Then, too, the
family had lived in the state capital for eight years. The enormously
wealthy old Ex-Governor himself, a widower for twenty years, spent
two-thirds of his time in the East or abroad, negotiating all the
while, by proxy of agent and telegram, in land and cattle deals back
home.
Frequently, during his two terms, the Governor had called Henry to the
capital for conference. Bek had stumped the country in behalf of his
second campaign. The Ex-Governor, through his agents, had negotiated
mortgages and sale of cattle and land with Bek.
The families mingled in this fashion, except, come to think about it, a
Howey had never crossed a Schuyler threshold on social visit bent, and
_vice versa_.
It is doubtful if Bek ever thought about it consciously. But the idea
of remaining to occupy the left wing of the house, while Warrington and
his French wife and three little girls flooded in, was unthinkable.
She never batted an eye about the annual performance of that move
into the flat over the garage; but from the first time that it took
place, when she had sat up all night, placating Leslie, to whom the
new sleeping-conditions were terrifying, some of the light went out
of Bek’s face. The pages of her diary, into which she wrote with
consistency, are blotchy in through here.
All this, the year that Davey was eleven and the World War broke out
with a clap over what had seemed to all thereabouts, except Henry, the
clear noontide of Peace on Earth.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Seventeen_
At first, Mathilda cried secret tears over Davey’s having to attend the
county school.
She cried secret tears over pretty nearly everything these days. That
was why her face seemed to wear an almost constant smile stretched
across the surface of her glassy teeth.
It was as if she had erected that smile on a stick and carried it about
before her face as you would a lorgnette.
They were slightly larger than the life, these artificial teeth
of Mathilda’s, with a dazzling-white lifeless glaze to them, and
pink-celluloid gums that had an air of detachment from the unsullied
porcelains.
The girls had remonstrated for years against this blazing dentistry,
and once, on one of her visits to Springfield, Rita had decoyed her
mother-in-law to the office of one of the town’s most eminent dental
practitioners. But it was no use. Mathilda would not so much as mount
the chair.
The great strip of smile, cutting so blatantly through the lean, bony
structure of her cheeks, was a barrage behind which she could cry more
secretly. It hurt her so terribly for the Old Gentleman, almost as much
as for Davey, considering the school taxes her husband had paid into
the town of Centralia. Davey, because of the move, obliged to receive
his schooling in a little one-room county structure that was no larger
than a shed!
Second Ward School in Centralia, where David had enjoyed only three
months of primary grade, was a three-story brick structure, as
regular-looking as a biscuit-tin. Henriette Simpson taught in that
school. Every Schuyler youngster had at one time or another carved
initials into its desks. Second Ward School was somehow David’s
right! sobbed Mathilda, bitterly, to herself. David’s right. The Old
Gentleman’s right!
Of course, there would have been a way to obtain special dispensation
by establishing Davey’s residence, nominally at least, with the Morton
Millikens in Centralia. Mathilda was all for that. Dave could leave
with Henry each morning and return with him at night. But the Old
Gentleman would hear to no such arrangement. No favor of any man! His
back and his head were up, so far as his habits in adversity were
concerned.
Besides, with the early-morning and after-school chores that were now
falling to Dave, county school, only one-half mile distant, offered
advantages.
At six o’clock, as early in the spring season as March, Davey used
to help Tarkington’s old black Nemo drive a herd of about sixty
Tarkington cattle to pasture, and then drive them home at dusk. Winter
mornings, long before the stars were gone, with a black crocheted
scarf of his mother’s tied over his ears, which he removed well before
coming in sight of the lantern hung in Nemo’s barn door, Dave used to
lickety-split over to the Tarkington place to help Nemo mix bran.
For this he received eighty cents a week. Sickeningly often, the winter
that Davey was eight, Mathilda, secretly from the Old Gentleman, who
even though knowing its inevitability would have yelled about it, was
obliged to accept from the boy this eighty cents every Saturday night.
He gave it so blithely and yet a little furtively. No spoken word
between him and his mother, and yet guarding the transaction from his
father, even as Mathilda guarded it.
“I’ll make it all right with you some day,” Mathilda was in the habit
of saying to him, as the coins slipped hands.
“Make it all right!” Why, as it was, the days were packed with being
all right. All-too-fleet days, for the doing of the many, many things
to be crammed into them. Even the ones of rising in the chilled dusk to
the light and heat of the candle stuck into the bottle, or to perhaps a
bit of gleam thrown in from a last great isolated star showing through
the frosted design on the window-pane.
The names of those last stars of the cold dawns were “Procyon” and
“Sirius.” “Castor” had a green fire in her. There was a way, with
Henry alongside, to figure the distance from the earth of certain
constellations. They had run across an old volume of Henry’s during the
move, called _The Geography of the Stars_, and another old text-book,
_Handbook of Astronomy_.
When it was not too cold in the room to have an arm out from the cover,
there were volumes to pore over. _The Relations of the Planets._
Pictures of them. There was a precision about this business of the
stars, once you were able to figure it out a little for yourself. There
was beauty in precision. Soldiers had precision. Stars. Funny, even
Dora had precision. The way her eyes made you want to look and look,
because they were set at exactly the right equidistance and were just
the precise blue of perfection.
There was an array of books which Davey had routed out of the attic for
himself. _Canterbury Tales._ _David Copperfield._ _Around the World
in Eighty Days._ _Black Beauty._ _A Condensed History of England._
_Peck’s Bad Boy._ _Golden Treasury._ _Forestry and Fisheries Report
for the State of Maine, 1901._ _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde._ _Treasure
Island._ _Essays of Elia._ _Franklin’s Autobiography._ _Æsop’s Fables._
_Burke on Taste._ _Boy’s Æneid._ _Voyage of the “Beagle.”_ _Gilbert’s
Voyage to Newfoundland._ _Don Quixote._ _Gil Blas._ _A Study of the
Diseases of Chickens._ _Circus Tim._ _The Jungle Book._ _Hoosier
Holiday._ _Course in Telegraphy._ _Jesse James—The Boy._ _The Red Badge
of Courage._ _The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew_, with “From
Henriette to Bek, with best wishes for a Happy Birthday, June 6, 1889,”
in angular script on the fly-leaf.[27]
A jungle of books picked hit-or-miss. For the lure of a title. Or
because, as in the case of the _Boy’s Æneid_ or _Burke on Taste_ or
Charles Lamb, Henry had paved the way. Or just because.
_The Red Badge of Courage._ Spelling out the title under its coating
of dust, it came through at one so! _The Red Badge of Courage._ Years
before he was ready to read it, that book was always lying around
somewhere in his room. For a long time it propped the unsteady fourth
leg of the small white-pine table. Once it was used for pressing
mint-leaves and left on a window-sill all night to be rained on and
warped. Motley of books, chosen for a motley of reasons or lack of them.
No, these were not days and nights to mope over, or to have Mathilda
dry her eyes over. Each and every one of them was a key-hole to which
you glued your eye and saw something of the great, grand, alluring
tomorrow.
The schoolhouse, a one-room frame building with a fine-bellied stove
on a tin mat in the center, adjoined the pasture where Davey helped
old Nemo to herd the Tarkington stock. One of the fascinating aspects
of the Tarkington pasture was that the city-limits imaginary line ran
through its middle, cutting a salt-rock in two.
The school windows overlooked all this. There were blackboards around
the four walls, and carved and whittled desks in sizes sufficiently
graduated to accommodate seven grades.
Small Miss Hassebrock, who the winter that Davey was eight was
beginning to sicken of a bone-disease that was to almost ossify her
and keep her ridden to a slanted bed for the next eighteen years of
her life, carried across her narrow shoulders the burden of that
ill-equipped schoolhouse.
There was a handful of children, seven grades and first year High
School entrusted to the tutelage of the gallant, ill-trained, underpaid
and undersized little person who seventeen years before had graduated
from the equally inadequate High School of a town called Ideola.
In the course of her seven-hour school-day, Miss Hassebrock taught
two-plus-two; Ohio-is-bounded-on-the-North-by; James-Monroe’s-
Administration-was-the most-serene-and-yet-one-of-the-most-important-
periods-in-the-life-of-the-nation;
(2_x_ + 3_y_ = 8)
(3_x_ + 7_y_ = 7);
This-is-the-forest-primeval;
The-battle-of-Bunker-Hill-all-things-considered-is-the-most...;
Listen-my-children-and-you-shall-hear; Friends, Romans, Countrymen;
How-many-yards-of-50-inch-linoleum-are-required-to-cover-a-floor-27×34;
all interspersed with drawings of geometrical cubes, spheres; rhomboids
in red chalk; and antiquated relief-maps of Europe and Asia.
It meant that in that small room of graduated desks and conglomerate
subjects, there was allotted to each child about twenty minutes of
direct instruction out of the day. Twenty minutes of Miss Hassebrock
tilting her little brain, like a spinster at the old gesture of tilting
her teapot, to let trickle the stale, small array of academic facts and
near-facts of the vintage of Ideola High School Normal Course, 1897.
The schoolroom squirmed with this ill-assorted conglomerate of
children, waiting or dreading their turn for the trickle. The mornings
were riddled by their spit-balls, hacked up by their penknives,
whispered into; hissed into; scraped into by their restless feet.
Often, during the drone of these days, with his mind sliding and shying
away from the chief exports of the Argentine Republic and “In 1066,
William the Conqueror invaded England,” David would become part of a
fast and furious spit-ball barrage taking place beneath desks.
These occasions could reduce Miss Hassebrock to a state of helplessness
that sent her rushing and dodging pell-mell about the room, usually
ending in tears, the poor pug of her hair lopsided and every pupil in
the room suddenly subsiding into a state of repentant and aboveboard
beatitude.
There was something a little horribly pathetic about her, as she stood
there defeated.
Once Davey, who sensed that more strongly than was comfortable for him,
let a few of the spit-balls lie conspicuously in his open palm, thereby
offering himself up as victim to take the edge off her somewhat
disquieting defeat. But if Miss Hassebrock saw them, she did not let
on. It was simpler, somehow, just to take up her pointer and indicate
on the map the point where the Suez Canal becomes the north outlet of
the Red Sea.
That meant the spit-ball barrages must to her seem something
appallingly outside her control. As a matter of fact, she used to
cry over them after school, bitterly and privately humiliated by the
realization of her lack of disciplinary powers.
Davey sensing that, kept out of future spit-ball encounters rather than
endure what the sight of her, standing there with her hair sliding, did
to him.
There were nine pupils in all. Ross Tawkett, a great lanky
sixteen-year-old fellow in the seventh grade. How he could confuse and
bully and intimidate poor Miss Hassebrock with questions specifically
designed to trip her up. Thus:
“Now Ross, name three of the eight planets of the solar system.”
“Mercury-Venus-Earth!”
“Excellent. That will be all, Ross.”
“No, now you name the rest of them to me, Miss Hassebrock, ’n’ then
I’ll know them all eight for next lesson.”
“Why—Ross, that’s not in our today’s lesson. Be seated.”
Poor Miss Hassebrock, sufficient unto the day were the facts thereof!
Once Davey found himself in the position of prompting his teacher.
“How can Thomas Jefferson have died on July 4th, 1826, Miss
Hassebrock,” sneered Ross one day, “when you just told me John Adams
died that same date?”
“Why, Ross—did I? Now did I? How come? Let me see—guess I must have
meant—now how come I made that mistake?”
How well Davey knew that they had both died on that date exactly fifty
years after they had signed the Declaration of Independence. Henry had
read him that long before he had ever entered a schoolroom.
“They both died on that same date,” mouthed David; hissed David to Miss
Hassebrock behind Ross’s back. And then when she continued to regard
him helplessly, held up two fingers in emphasis. “Both. Both—died.
Same—day!”
“Of course,” said Miss Hassebrock, rather coldly. “It is a well-known
historical fact that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the
same date. David, come to order or take a demerit.” Ross was a class
terror, all right.[28]
Six out of the nine pupils were primaries, besides David, who fitted
into third grade because of certain precocities resulting from the long
evenings with Henry, and a girl named Flora Wohlgemuth in fifth, whose
father ran a flour-mill. A great flax doll, with the loveliest lips,
that adenoids kept rather breathlessly apart.
Knowledge of that educational boll-weevil, the adenoid, was not part of
Miss Hassebrock’s teaching-equipment. She daily instructed little Flora
to keep her mouth closed, and struggled to crash the principles of long
division through the two greatly enlarged adenoidal impedimenta to
Flora’s alertness.
Later, still without benefit of surgery, Miss Wohlgemuth was in turn to
teach school, through those same two, even more deplorably enlarged,
impedimenta.
There was something about Flora’s round little smudge of a face that
one day impelled David to yield to an old temptation to wash it roughly
with a snowball. There was an hour after school of writing “The Good
That Men Do Lives After Them” fifty times down foolscap; and Mrs.
Wohlgemuth, who ran a butter-and-egg stand “at market” in Court House
Square, complained to the Old Gentleman in Low German.
For it, the Old Gentleman stood David up on the edge of the kitchen
table and gave him three wallops against the seat of Henry’s cut-down
trousers.
It was almost a pleasantly reminiscent chastisement, recalling
the satisfaction of feeling the snow squash up against Flora’s
boneless-feeling little face, which had to it the feel of mashed potato.
Years later, from the vantage of a private hospital room, made
possible by the annuity of her one-time pupil, Miss Hassebrock used
to strain her tired old hack of a brain for anecdotes of Davey. She
was too conscientious to invent, even where anecdotes would have been
treasures, but as she used to say, there was just nothing to be said
about Davey as a youngster, those primary-years, that could not be
said of the average run of them who had shuffled their small-boy days
across the routine pine floor of that schoolroom. Nothing, except the
certain precocity traceable to the home-opportunity of reading with an
older brother, and the intent quality he had of listening and sucking
in, well in advance, the work of the classes ahead of him. And then the
funny additional precocities that contact with the older man’s mind
had given him. Rag-tags of odds and ends of information that clung to
his mind like fuzz. At six, he had already begun to hoard books in the
secret library of the spring-house.[29]
Once at Friday afternoon platform-exercises, when a small boy named Ike
Mintz, the son of a dealer in old iron, began to sniffle and shuffle of
inability to remember his allotted recitation, Davey volunteered with
the following:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy.
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the East
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Henry frequently read this poem aloud to himself, evenings. It is
doubtful if, at the time, Dave took in its meaning as much as its
music. It is certain he did not know its source. Neither did Miss
Hassebrock.
No, he was scarcely a memorable pupil, except for his sturdy little
personality thumping in so dependably every morning. Never tardy.
Seldom unruly enough for more than a passing reprimand. Seldom
brilliant. Never remiss.
There is this little incident, which has to do with Teddy. All of
the school-day Teddy lay in the vestibule that led into the small
section where the children hung their hats and coats, or wandered the
countryside of the vicinity, usually showing up at recess or lunch
period for the droppings from Davey’s lunch-basket.
There was an old feud between Punt, a fox-terrier that belonged to Red
Kelsoe, and Teddy.
Their masters had bitten the dust together more than once over the
mangled ear or the torn flank of the conquered. Teddy was half Punt’s
size, but an eye-to-eye fighter. Punt, on the other hand, had a trick
of hurling himself from the rear, taking his adversary unawares. Teddy
bore scars that had been inflicted by a rearward adversary.
One day, just as the children were filing out of school, a series of
yelps split the tired, four-o’clock air.
Teddy’s moment had come. At the very threshold of the building, his
teeth into the rear of the terrier’s neck, Teddy had Punt pinioned in
the bloody dust.
Through the cries of excited children, as they formed a tight circle,
the air thickening and blurring with more dust and yelps, there mingled
the squeals and the high admonitive tones of Miss Hassebrock.
There was a red trail across the school-yard and with his teeth all of
their depth into the terrier’s throat, Teddy was shaking him like a
rat, releasing him only to prove further the glory of his sure vantage,
by leaping at him for fresh clutch.
It was a one-sided struggle this time, and David had finally to pull
Teddy off by the scruff of his neck, while he still leaped and yelped
for more Punt-flavored blood.
It was Davey’s and Teddy’s moment, as Punt, limping, slunk off
tail-down past his master, the children applauding the turning of the
tables of this old feud between dogs and masters.
It was Davey’s moment all right, when Red, instead of leaping at him
with his usual taunt of victory, stood grinding his toe in the dust.
Except that Davey knew what Teddy knew! Teddy had conquered his foe
with his foe’s own despised methods. Teddy had leaped on Punt unawares!
Davey knew, in his heart, that was the only way Teddy could ever have
gained that particular first strangle-hold over an adversary twice his
heft and cunning. Teddy must have leaped at Punt as he lay sleeping at
the threshold, waiting for Red. It was in the half-slink of his tail,
as he crept up to his master. It was in the fawning lick of his tongue.
Davey knew! And Teddy knew what Davey knew, and victory was as dead-sea
fruit.
And in that instant, as Davey stood looking down at his dog, and shame
of shameful conquest lay in the eyes of both, the belated flash of
understanding was transmuted to Red.
“You’re a dirty little sneak!” he shouted, and batted David sideways on
the head, so that he saw things in waves. “He sneaked up on Punt—yer
dog’s a dirty little sneak, too!”
“Red,” said Miss Hassebrock sharply, stepping forward into the ring,
“that blow was a cowardly act. Either you apolog——”
“No,” said David, a little dully, “Teddy did sneak up. His winning
don’t count.”
That evening, after the supper-things had been cleared, Mathilda,
who had pains in her legs from having done a day’s washing in the
damp Igrotte cellar, set about the unsavory task of stewing up some
asafœtida in an old tomato-can.
This she sewed up into a small bag and hung about David’s protesting
neck, for what she termed his right peaked look.