To the query, “Well, do you have to do everything they ask you to, Harold?” the lad’s answer was a renewal of the heart-breaking sobs.  These softened the mother’s heart, as many and many a woman’s heart has been melted through all the ages.  She soothed the truant child and petted him, until the cramping in his throat relaxed sufficiently to admit of the passage of an astonishingly large slice of bread and butter and sugar.  After it was disposed of, Harold busied himself by assorting his old iron scraps on the back porch, and his mother smiled as she fancied she heard the boy trying to whistle a tune.

Harold had left the porch before his father came home with the beefsteak for supper, and Mrs. Jones met her husband with:  “Pa Jones, what could you be thinking of—­punishing that boy before the other children?  Do you want to break what little spirit he has?  Why, that child was nearly in hysterics for an hour after you left!”

Mr. Jones hung up his crooked cane, put a stick of wood in the stove, scraped his pipe with his knife, and blew through the stem.

“I guess he wasn’t hurt much,” replied the father.  Then he added, as he put a live coal in the pipe:  “I s’pose you went an’ babied him an’ spoiled it all.”  There was a puffing pause, after which Mr. Jones added, “If you’d let him go more, an’ didn’t worry your head off when he was out of sight, he’d amount to more.”

Mrs. Jones always gave her husband three moves before she spoke.  “Yes! yes! you’d make that boy a regular little rowdy if you had your way, William Jones.”

In the mean time Harold Jones had heard a long, shrill whistle in the alley, and, answering it, he ran as rapidly as his spindling legs would carry him.  He knew it was the boys.  They were grinning broadly when he came to them.  It was Piggy Pennington who first spoke, “Oh, pa, I won’t do it any more,” repeating the phrase several times in a suppressed voice, and leering impishly at Mealy.

“Aw, you’re makin’ that up,” answered Mealy in embarrassment.  But Piggy continued his teasing until Abe Carpenter said:  “Say, Mealy, we want you to go to the cave with us to-morrow; can you?”

The “can you” was an imputation on his personal liberty that Mealy resented.  He replied “Uh-huh! you just bet your bottom dollar I can.”  Piggy began teasing again, but Abe silenced him, and the boys sat in the dirt behind the barn, chattering about the new boy, whose name, according to the others, was “Bud” Perkins.  Mealy entered the conversation with much masculine pomp—­too much, in fact; for when he became particularly vain-glorious some one in the group was certain to glance at his shoes—­and shoes in June in Boyville are insignia of the weaker sex, the badges of shame.

But Mealy did not feel his disgrace.  He walked up the ash path to the kitchen with an excellent imitation of manly pride in his gait.  He kicked at a passing cat, and shook his head bravely, talking to himself about the way he would have whipped the new boy if his father had not interrupted the fight.