“Henry,” she said, as the boy walked past her carrying peppergrass to the bird, “Henry, what made you act so last night?”

The boy dropped his head and answered:  “I dunno.”

“But, Henry, didn’t you know it was wrong?”

“I dunno.”

“Why did you stick that little boy with the pin?”

“Well—­well—­” he gasped, preparing for a defence.  “Well—­he pinched me first.”

“Yes, Henry, but don’t you know that it’s wrong to do those things in church?  Don’t you see how bad it was?”

“I was just a-playin’, Miss Morgan; I didn’t mean to.”

Bud did not dare to trust his instinctive reading of the signs.  He went on impulsively:  “I wanted him to quit, but he just kept right on, and Brother Baker didn’t touch him.”

The wind brought the staccato music of the circus band to the foster-mother’s ears.  The music completed her moral decay, for she was thinking, if Brother Baker would only look after his own children as carefully as he looked after those of other people, the world would be better.  Then she said:  “Now, Henry, if I let you go, just this once—­now just this once, mind you—­will you promise never to do anything like that again?”

Blackness dropped from the boy’s spirit, and by main strength he strangled a desire to yell.  The desire revived when he reached the alley, and he ran whooping to the circus grounds.

There is a law of crystallization among boys which enables molecules of the same gang to meet in whatever agglomeration they may be thrown.  So ten minutes after Bud Perkins left home he found Piggy and Jimmy and old Abe and Mealy in the menagerie tent.  Whereupon the South End was able to present a bristling front to the North End—­a front which even the pleasings of the lute in the circus band could not break.  But the boys knew that the band playing in the circus tent meant that the performance in the ring was about to begin.  So they cut short an interesting dialogue with a keeper, concerning the elephant that remembered the man who gave her tobacco ten years ago, and tried to kill him the week before the show came to Willow Creek.  But when the pageant in the ring unfolded its tinselled splendor in the Grand Entry, Bud Perkins left earth and walked upon clouds of glory.  His high-strung nerves quivered with delight as the ring disclosed its treasures—­Willie Sells on his spotted ponies, James Robinson on his dapple gray, the “8 funny clowns—­count them 8,” the Japanese jugglers and tumblers, the bespangled women on the rings, the dancing ponies, and the performing dogs.  The climax of his joy came when Zazell, “the queen of the air,” was shot from her cannon to the trapeze.  Bud had decided, days before the circus, that this feature would please him most.  Zazell’s performance was somewhat tame, but immediately thereafter a really startling thing happened.  A clown holding the trick mule called to the boys near Bud, who nudged