“The kid’s showing speed,” he admitted, cordially.  “If he just had something back of them punches!”

“It was a daisy!” exclaimed Sharon.  “My suffering stars, what a daisy!”

“’Twas neatly placed!” said Pegleg.

“I’m surprised at you!” said Sharon later to the panting apprentice.  “I’m surprised and grieved!  You boys mixing it here every day for weeks and never letting on!”

“I never thought you’d like it,” said Wilbur.

“Like it!” said Sharon.  He said it unctuously.  “And say, don’t you let on to Miss Penniman that I set here and held the watch for you.  I ain’t wanting that to get out on me.”

“No, sir,” said Wilbur.

Later Sharon tried to avoid Winona one day on River Street, but when he saw that she would not be avoided he met her like a man.

“I’ve reasoned with the boy from time to time,” he confessed, gloomily, “but he’s self-headed, talking huge high about being a good lightweight and all that.  I don’t know—­mebbe I haven’t taken just the right tack with him yet.”

Winona thought him curiously evasive in manner.  She believed that he feared the worst for the boy, but was concealing it from her.

“His eye is almost well where that cowardly bully struck him,” she told Sharon.  “If only we could get him into something where he could hold his head up.”

“He does that too much now,” began Sharon, impulsively, but stopped, floundering.  “I mean he ain’t enough ashamed,” he concluded feebly, and feigned that someone had called him imperatively from the door of the First National Bank.

From time to time Spike’s boxing manner grew tense for a period of days.  He tightened up, as Sharon put it, and left a sore and battered apprentice while he went off to some distant larger town to fight, stepping nonchalantly aboard the six-fifty-eight with his fighting trunks and shoes wrapped in a copy of the Newbern Advance, and shifting his gum as he said good-bye to Wilbur, who would come down to see him off.

Sometimes Spike returned from these sorties unscathed and with money.  Oftener he came back without money and with a face—­from abrasive thrusts—­looking as if a careless golfer had gone over him and neglected to replace the divots.  After these times there were likely to follow complicated episodes of dentistry at the office of Doctor Patten.  These would render the invincible smile of Spike more refulgent than ever.

The next birthday of Merle Whipple was celebrated at a time when Spike had been particularly painstaking in view of an approaching combat.  Not only did he leave his young friend with an eye that compelled the notice, an eye lavishly displaying all the tints yet revealed by spectroscopic analysis, and which by itself would have rendered him socially undesirable, but he bore a swollen nose and a split and puffy lip; bore them proudly, it should be said, and was not enough cast down, in Winona’s opinion, that his shameful wounds would deter him from mingling with decent folk.  Indeed, Winona had to be outspoken before she convinced him that a birthday party was now no place for him.  He would have gone without misgiving, and would have pridefully recounted the sickening details of that last round in which Spike Brennon had permitted himself to fancy he faced a veritable antagonist.  Still he cared little for the festivity.