“Jerry,” pleaded Nora’s coaxing voice, “come on out and play.  Danny didn’t mean anything.”

Jerry did not answer.  He did not even look around.

“Danny wants you to play with us,” continued Nora.  “Won’t you?”

“No,” Jerry replied at length.

“Why won’t you?”

“He didn’t play fair.”

“I’ll count over again, Jerry, so’s I’ll be the—­” The voice stopped and then continued chokily, “—­the audience.”

Jerry knew what it cost her to say that, but he hardened his heart.  “I don’t want to play no more,” he said.

“Please do, Jerry.  I’m sorry I didn’t play fair, Jerry.”

“I won’t,” pouted Jerry.  “He said I could be the el’funt some of the time.”

“Mebbe he’ll let you after while, after he’s tired of playin’ it,” suggested Nora, without any great fervor of conviction in her voice.  “I’ll ask him to.”

With that Nora left the room.  He wondered if she could persuade Danny to let him be the elephant part of the time.  He might play then, if Danny coaxed him to.

He heard the screen slam after Nora and waited, listening for it to go slam-bang much louder.  That would mean that Danny was coming to let him play elephant.  Danny always let the door go shut slam-bang.  He waited a long time and then he heard the shouting of the children.  They were playing circus without him!  Danny wouldn’t let him be the elephant.  Very well, if they didn’t want him around and wouldn’t let him play with them, he would run away.  Danny would be sorry then.  Perhaps he would be killed on a railway track or something and Danny would cry over his dead body, he’d be so sorry he didn’t let him be the elephant.

That thought comforted him and he began gathering up the things he wanted to take with him.  There was the fur cap that Mother ’Larkey had made for him out of an old muff of hers, the winter before.  He couldn’t leave that behind, nor yet the overcoat which she had made for him out of an old coat of her husband’s just after Mr. Mullarkey had died.  The other things he didn’t care much about.  Yes, after all, he would take the ragged, fuzzy cloth dog that Kathleen had insisted on giving him.  The dog had lost an ear, a forepaw and one eye; still he cherished it because Kathleen had given it to him of her own free will, something that Danny nor Chris nor Celia Jane nor even Nora had ever done.

He would wear the cap and overcoat, even if it was summer; then he wouldn’t get so tired carrying them.  He put on the fur cap, pulling it well down over his ears, and slipped into the overcoat.  Slowly he took up the woolly dog and started down the stairs.  Then he remembered the red mittens which a lady had brought him at Christmas, and returned to get them.  He put them on carefully, smoothing them over his hands, and then went downstairs and out by the front door, prepared for any kind of weather.

He was going to run away again, as he had from that man with the scarred face.  He heard the children shouting at their play and decided he would first watch them a minute and perhaps let Danny know what he had driven him into doing.  He went down the alley which led past the woodshed, behind which the circus performance was going on, and stopped to watch with his face wedged between two pickets of the fence.