Well, you never can tell how things are going to go in this world, I guess. I don't mean that I spent all my time thinking how getting the tricycle with two seats would make Mamie Little think more of me than she thought of Toady Williams, because I didn't. I had school and my chores and me and Swatty and Bony was building a capstan in our side yard, to pull up stumps and move houses if we wanted to, but once in a while I did think how I would ride up to Mamie Little's front gate on the tricycle and say, “Say! wanta take a ride?”

It looked as if it wouldn't be long before Herb and Fan got married, because they hadn't fought for a long while and Fan was embroidering towels by day and by night. One reason it all looked good was that Miss Murphy, who was my teacher and had had Herb for a while, had gone away for a while and Miss Carter was substituting for her in our room. So Fan needn't be jealous of Miss Murphy any more.

So I felt pretty good mostly but I was feeling pretty mean this day, because Swatty and Bony had been let out on time and Miss Carter had kept me in after school. I was feeling mean because they would be working on the capstan, and it was the day we thought we would get it finished and begin capstaning things with it, and I wouldn't be home when they got it done. I wanted to be there when they started to use it. So that made me feel mean one way, and teacher made me feel meaner, another way.

I liked Miss Carter better than any teacher I ever had. So all I did was not know my geography-lesson, or my arithmetic-lesson or my grammar-lesson, or my history, and I missed in spelling. I guess maybe I read all right, because she didn't say I didn't, but maybe she forgot to talk about that because she was so busy saying my deportment was bad and it was certainly an outrage that my copy-book was so poorly kept. So she kept me in to study, and it was four o'clock pretty soon, and she put her papers in her desk and shut down the lid and came back to my seat. Everybody else had gone home. I was sort of scared. I thought she was going to say her patience was exhausted and then whale me with the rawhide she kept in the closet.

But she didn't. She came back to where I was, and when she got to my seat she sat down in it beside me and I had to move over so she would have room. I guess I ought to have put my hands in my pockets, but of course I didn't know what she was going to do, and the first thing she did was to put her left hand on top of my hand and hold it, like that, on top of my desk. So I tried to pull it away, but she held on. So then she put her arm—her right arm—along the desk back of me, and I felt mighty mean. A boy don't like to be armed around that way, or his hand held like that.

“George,” she said, “what is it? Why are you acting the way you are? Are you doing it to try to distress me?”

Well, I couldn't say anything to that, could I? I just looked at the top of the desk and moved my feet around.

“Tell me!” she said as if she wasn't mad at all but as if she was sorry. “I can't understand it. It is no use for you to pretend you can't learn your lessons, for I have seen that it is no trouble at all for you, when you want to. And you are such a naturally good, well-behaved boy at heart—why are you trying to act as if you were not? Are you doing it to distress me?”

I guess I sort of said “No!” I don't know what I did say. I felt pretty bad, with my hand held like that and her arm right there and liable to get around my shoulders the way she does to the girls when she's fond of them and they disappoint her and she has a talk with them and makes them cry.

“Then what is it, George?” she asked.

Well, you can't blat right out and say nothing is the matter only you don't feel like learning any old lessons or anything, can you? There wasn't anything the matter. I didn't have it in for teacher or anything. I just didn't feel like learning any lessons about then, and it was mean of teacher to let on I was doing things because I didn't like her or something. So I didn't say anything. I sort of scrooged down in my seat so she couldn't put her arm around me any more than it was.

“Is it Mamie Little?” she asked then, all of a sudden.

That was an awful mean thing to say, and I guess she knew it was, because when a fellow has a girl he don't want anybody to know it or talk about it. He'll fight any fellow that says it, but he can't fight his teacher when she says it.

“I think it must be Mamie Little, George,” she said next, “because I have noticed you keep your eyes on her more than you do on your lessons.”

That made me squirm, I guess! But that wasn't the worst. She wasn't hardly started.

“I don't blame you for liking Mamie, George,” she said. “She is a sweet child and I love her, too, and I am glad you are fond of her; but don't you think she would like you better if you learned your lessons and behaved in a manner she could admire, instead of trying to attract her attention by smarty tricks? Don't you think a boy with your ability should try to impress her by his excellence rather than by his smarty tricks?”

Gee! I felt mean! Running a fellow's girl in on him like that! I was so ashamed all over that I couldn't move. I didn't dare to move even a finger. I couldn't do anything but swallow.

“Now, we won't say anything more about it,” she said, and she patted my hand! “You know how much I like you, George, and how proud I usually am of you, and I think Mamie is fond of you, too. I don't think you need to be a smarty to attract her. If you don't care to do it for me, George, tell me you will try to learn your lessons and behave better on Mamie's account. You will, won't you? Say you will!”

I guess I tried to say I would, but I couldn't even swallow. I didn't know how I'd even get away from there, because Miss Carter might stay until I said I would or something, and I couldn't work my voice: it had dried up, I guess. But I didn't have to say anything. Miss Carter put her hand on my head and let it stay there a minute, and then she smiled and jumped up as if everything was fixed and I had said I would, and she said: “All right, George; you can go home.” And I went, you bet.

Well, that settled Miss Carter with me! She had been one of the three women I thought were dandy, because the other two were my mother and my grandmother that everybody calls “Ladylove” because she is so dear, but after that I was done with Miss Carter. Anybody that would talk to a fellow about his girl as if she was his girl! I guessed maybe I would n't go back to school any more unless I could get transferred to another teacher's room.

So I felt pretty mean and sore and everything when I got home, and I started around to the side yard, where Swatty and Bony were finishing the capstan, and all at once my mother came to the end of the porch and pulled the vines aside and said:

“George, come here!”

I tried to think what I had done to make her say it like that, but I couldn't, only a fellow is always doing something, so it didn't matter much what it was. I went around and onto the porch.

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

“George,” my mother said in the way they call severe, “Mrs. Martin was here.”

“Yes'm,” I said, for I didn't know what else to say, because I didn't know why Mrs. Martin had been there. I knew who Mrs. Martin was and where she lived, because she was the lady that had the lame boy that would never grow up but would always be about five years old. He was thirteen years old, and he played with a rag doll and always stayed in his yard, but sometimes he looked out between the fence-pickets. Sometimes when I went downtown on errands and got a nickel for it and bought some candy, I'd give him a piece when I went by, and so would Swatty and so would Bony. Sometimes he'd say, “Where you get that ball? I want it!” just like a little baby, and if we didn't give it to him, he'd cry, but we couldn't give him our ball, could we? So when we went by his house we hid anything he might cry for, so he wouldn't cry for it. That was all I knew about Mrs. Martin, only she was a widow and she was cross sometimes. Anyway, sometimes she looked cross.

“George,” my mother said—and I guess she never spoke to me any sadder than she did then—“Mrs. Martin told me something I would never have believed of my boy. I have always thought you were a kind-hearted, considerate boy. Oh, George, why—why did you strike that poor, helpless little cripple?”

“I did not! I didn't do any such thing! It ain't so!” I said, because I knew she meant I had hit Sammy Martin.

My mother sort of threw out her hand.

“Don't!” she said. “It is enough without that. It is enough to be a bully without being a liar. Mrs. Martin has told me—”

“I ain't a liar!” I said, because I was so mad I could have cried. “If she said that, she's a liar; that's what she is!”

Well, I oughtn't to have called a lady that, or anybody, but I was so mad I didn't think. I wasn't thinking about how I said it, and when a fellow's mother looks at him the way my mother was looking at me, and won't believe him when he's telling the truth, what's he going to do? I guess my mother was feeling pretty bad herself or she wouldn't have said any such thing to me as that I was one. Because I wasn't one! Not about that! I had never hit Sammy Martin. I had never done anything to him but give him candy once in a while.

“George!” said my mother, and she was sad about it, as if she was now quite hopeless about me.

Then she went on, as quietly as if we were at a funeral:

“That poor child's mother came here to beg me to protect her child against you—to beg me to ask you not to harm him again! You called him to the fence and struck him across the face with a stick or a switch. Oh, don't deny it! She has seen you coax him to the fence before and give him candy, and when he came crying to her with a welt rising on his poor face, he told her you had done it. And I thought you were—I thought—”

So then she cried, and I couldn't do anything but stand there and feel—oh, I don't know how I felt! I guess I had never felt like that in my life. It wasn't so, and I knew it wasn't so, and nobody would ever believe it wasn't so. I couldn't do anything but stand there and wish I was dead or grown up or something. I just stood and looked down, and once in a while I blinked. So then, after a while, my mother wiped her eyes and walked past me without saying anything or looking at me and went into the house, and I stood there awhile and then I sort of turned and went to the edge of the porch and sneaked around to the back yard. It wasn't fair to think such things of me when they were not so, and I felt awful bad. I never wanted to see my mother again. So then Swatty saw me and shouted.

“Come on!” he yelled. “We've got her done! She's a dandy!”

So I ran to where the capstan was, and she was a dandy!

I guess you know what capstans are—the things they use in moving houses? In Riverbank they move a lot of houses, because people are always wanting to build other houses where houses already are, and you can't move a house without a capstan. They have them on boats, too, but not quite the same kind. The house-moving kind is like a square box, without sides. In the middle, up and down, is a kind of roller that the rope rolls onto, and the roller has to stick up above the top of the box so there can be a place to stick a pole into to turn the roller. When they move houses they set the capstan in the middle of the street a long way from the house, and carry a rope back and fasten it to the house, and then a horse that is fastened to the pole walks around and around the capstan, stepping over the rope every time he passes it, and winds up the rope, and that pulls the house. Only we didn't have any horse, so we thought maybe we'd use Swatty's cow. But we didn't. We turned the capstan ourselves. All the time we were making the capstan Swatty said the cow would turn it, but when we got it done he said:

“Who ever heard of a cow turning a capstan?”

“I did,” I said. “In the Bible-book there is a picture of a cow turning a capstan.”

“Well, that ain't the same thing,” Swatty said. “That's a Bible-cow, and ours is part Alderney and part Holstein.”

“And this isn't any cow-capstan, anyway,” Bony said. “A cow couldn't work this capstan, because a cow has two toes, and she'd get the rope caught between her toes and fall and kill herself.”

“Whose cow are you saying would fall and kill herself—my cow?” Swatty asked, the way he did when he meant: “Take it back or I'll lick you!” Then he says: “You'd better not say my cow would fall and kill herself. If my cow couldn't step over a rope without getting it between her toes, I'd take her and kill her.”

“Aw, you would not!” I said.

“Yes, I would, too!” Swatty said. “We had a cow once that couldn't step over a rope without getting it between her toes, and my father took her down to the river and killed her. You needn't say we'd have a cow that can't step over a rope—”

“I never said it,” I said.

“Well, if you didn't say it, who did say it, I'd like to know,” Swatty asked. “Bony didn't say it and you'd better not say he said it, because he came over and helped me finish the capstan, and you stayed in school and let us do it.”

“I didn't stay in school; I was kept in.”

“Well, you say you was, but I don't have to believe it, do I?” Swatty said. “I don't have to believe everything you say just because I'm—because I'm in your yard, do I?”

Well, I saw Swatty wanted a fight, and I wanted a fight anyway. I felt like it. So I said; “Who are you calling a liar?”

I went up close to him, and he went up close to me; and then I pushed him and he pushed me back; and then I hit him and he hit me back. And when he had me down and asked me if I had had enough and got off of me, we went ahead with the capstan. I wasn't hurt anywhere except on the inside of my cheek, where a tooth cut it.

The capstan was a good one. Swatty showed how it worked, and pushed the pole around, and it worked fine. So then I got my sled out of the barn, where it had been since last winter, and we took turns being pulled on the sled. So then we wished we had a house to move, but there wasn't any house or building we dared move. I bet we could have done it. So we looked for something we couldn't move without a capstan, so we could use the capstan to move it. There is no use having a capstan if you haven't anything to do with it. You might just as well not have made one. So I said:

“I'll tell you! Let's pull up the old stump that's in our front yard!”

“All right—let's!” Swatty said.

We had a lot of trees in our yard—a big silver poplar in the back yard that was twice as big around as a barrel, and a yellow-mellow apple, and a Benoni apple, and a black-heart cherry, and a row of pines leading down to the gate, and big maples inside the fence, and maybe some more. There were trees all over town, lots of them, and you would have thought there had always been trees, but I guess that isn't so. People planted them. When people came to Riverbank and made a town of it, they planted the trees because there were none when they came, and I guess they liked it better with trees growing than when it was all bare. I know my grandmother did.

My grandmother was an old, old woman, and she lived with us because the house had been built by my grandfather, and my grandfather had planted the trees. That was a long time before I was ever born. We called my grandmother “Ladylove,” because I guess that is what my grandfather called her. Nobody ever called her anything else but Ladylove, not “Gran'ma” or anything like that.

I guess nobody ever loved trees the way she loved them. I guess she was always sorry she had come away from Pennsylvania where there are lots of trees and hills. Sometimes, early in the morning, she would come out on the porch and look up and say, “I lift up mine eyes to the hills!” and then she would sigh and shake her head. That was because there was no hills in Riverbank when she lifted? up her eyes from our porch, and I guess she was thinking of the hills in Pennsylvania, because when she was a girl and lived there, there were always hills to lift up her eyes to—hills that were covered with trees.

That was the way my grandmother Ladylove was, as old as old, and nobody ever loved trees the way she did. She liked boys too. She liked all the boys that ever came to play with me. She was the only one that never scolded me. Plenty of times when we had fresh cookies and nobody was to touch a single one until the next day, Ladylove would see us playing in the yard and she would come out with a china plate with a napkin on it piled up with cookies. Then she would say a verse of poetry and give us the cookies and go into the house just as happy as could be. Sometimes she would forget she had brought us any and would come right out with another plateful and say the poetry over again and be just as happy over that one as she was over the other.

When I said, “Let's pull the old stump that's in the front yard,” I didn't think anything but that it would be a good thing to pull. I didn't even know it had ever been a tree; it had always been a stump since I was a little bit of a kid, anyway. It wasn't much of a stump any more. It was only about as high as my knee, and right at the ground it was only as big around as a man's knee. Once I had a little hatchet, but it wouldn't cut much, but I chopped the stump with it. I could only chop off a little splinter at a time, and I never got much off. It only made the stump raggedy at the top. It was just an old stump that wasn't worth anything and wasn't any good to anybody.

Swatty and Bony and me started to move the capstan into the front yard where the stump was. It was so heavy we could hardly wiggle it, so after we had moved it an inch or two I said:

“Aw! we can't move it!”

So Bony said the same thing; but Swatty stood and looked at the capstan awhile, and then he said: “Yes, we can move it, too! We can make it move itself.”

“How can we?”

“You come ahead and I'll show you,” he said; and he did. He drove a stake into the ground about as far as our capstan rope would reach, and fastened the rope to it. Then he made Bony turn the capstan pole, and that wound up the rope, and the capstan just had to move toward the stake. When we got it to the stake we knocked the stake out with an axe and put it in again farther along. That way we moved the capstan to where we wanted it. Swatty thought of how to do it.

So then we had the capstan in the front yard, and we tied the rope around the old stump and tried to pull it, but the capstan just moved up to the stump. So Swatty said he knew what was the matter and that we were all crazy because we didn't think of it before, and that all the house-movers, when they were moving houses, drove stakes in front of their capstans to keep them from moving, and stakes behind them to keep them from tipping up.

We got some stakes and did it. Swatty drove the stakes because he was strongest, and anyway, he knew how to swing an axe, because he had often studied how the circus roughnecks swung them. Anyway he said he had. He said he had sat for over an hour and just studied how they swung axes at stakes and that then he asked one roughneck to let him try it, and he did, and he drove over a hundred. He said that while he was driving stakes Mr. Barnum came out of the big tent and watched him, and that he liked the way he was driving stakes so well that he offered him a hundred dollars a year just to drive stakes for the circus. So I asked Swatty if he took up the offer, and he said he did. He said he went with the circus all over the United States, driving stakes, and that he drove so many he got so he could drive a stake with one blow. So then he said he went to Mr. Bamum and asked him to pay him two hundred dollars a year, but Mr. Bamum said he couldn't afford it. He said Swatty was worth two hundred dollars a year but the show couldn't afford it. So, Swatty said, he came home. That's what Swatty said, but I didn't hardly believe it. But, anyway, we had to let him drive the stakes.

Well, the stump didn't come out as easy as we had thought it would. It was pretty rotten, and it pulled off piece by piece, but the inside was tough. Our rope was old, too, and broke nearly every time we tautened it. But it was good fun, anyway. We took turns turning the capstan pole. One would turn and the other would keep the rope on the stump and the other would be boss and shout, “Whoa! Get up! Whoa there, you!” A lot of boys came and looked through the picket fence and wished we would let them come in and help us capstan the stump, but we wouldn't. What's the use of having something somebody else hasn't got, if you are going to let them have it too?

Pretty soon we got the stump all pulled. There was only a hole where it had been and the rotted wood was scattered around on the grass, and we felt pretty good about it, because nobody wants old stumps sticking up in their yards. Swatty said maybe my father would give me a quarter for pulling the stump and I thought maybe he would, too. We all felt as if we had done something pretty fine, and I wished I could go and get my mother and have her come out and see how good our capstan was and have her say, “Why, that's fine, Georgie! I'll have your father give you a quarter when he comes home.” But I remembered about Mrs. Martin. I remembered that my mother would probably never think anything I ever did again was any good at all. So I didn't call her.

Just then Ladylove—my grandmother—came out of the side door. She stood a moment on the top step, looking, and then she came down to the grass and started toward us. She had a plate in her hand, and there were graham crackers on it, because there were no cookies that day. I guess she heard us shouting and thought we would like some graham crackers, because we were boys.

As soon as I saw her I jumped and ran toward her, because she was some one we could show what we had done.

“Come here, Ladylove,” I shouted. “Come on, we want to show you what we did with our capstan!”

“Yes! yes!” she said.

So I took the plate of crackers, and with the other hand I sort of steadied her elbow, because our yard wasn't very smooth and she didn't walk very steady or very fast. We came to where the capstan was, and she steadied herself with one hand on it.

“There!” I said. “See what we did, Ladylove! We pulled that old tree stump right out of the ground. We got rid of that old stump all right!”

Ladylove stood quiet so long that I got frightened. She looked up at the sky and when she looked down at me there were tears in her eyes. I could see them.

“My tree! My beautiful tree!” she said. “Ah, Georgie, could you kill my tree?” And then she closed her eyes and held out her hands and said:

It wasn't a horde of trees at all, nothing but an old rotten stump and no good to anybody, but I felt awful bad about it as soon as she spoke that poetry—not because the old stump was any good but because my grandmother was so old and seemed to think so much of the old stump.

Me and Swatty and Bony just stood and didn't know what to say. We wished she had scolded us or something instead of feeling that way.

“Gone! Gone!” she said, letting her hands fall, as if that old stump was the only thing she ever cared for. “Gone!”

Well, we couldn't say anything, could we, when she felt like that? We could just feel mean. It didn't matter that we knew it was just an old, rotten, no good stump, because she thought it was a tree and that we had cut it down. She shook her head, and then:

So then she turned and walked away with her head bent down and the tears running down her cheeks, and I stood there with the plate of graham crackers in my hand and didn't know what to do or what to say, and Bony stood and looked kind of scared. I didn't dare look after my grandmother. I just felt mean and sneaky and ashamed and sort of miserable about everything, because I knew she thought I had done it when I knew I oughtn't to have done it. At the step of the side door she stopped and looked back and then went into the house, all old and sad-looking. I guessed I had broken her heart, she felt so bad about it.

So then Bony started to go home. He didn't say anything, but he sort of edged off as if he wanted to sneak away and get out of any trouble I was in. Swatty spoke right up.

“You come back here!” he said. “You come back, or I'll show you!”

I was glad to have anybody say anything, even that.

“Aw, I got to go home,” Bony said. But he came back. He knew what Swatty would do to him if he didn't. So then Swatty made a face at the pieces of old stump.

“Garsh!” he said. “Garsh! who'd of thunk anybody cared for that old stump? We didn't know Ladylove cared that much for it, did we? Well, come on!”

“Come on where?” Bony sort of whined.

“Where do you think?” Swatty asked. “What do I care where? Anywhere we can get a tree to plant—that's where. We'll get a big tree, like those maple trees, and we'll fetch it here and plant it; that's what we'll do! I'll tell you what. We'll take the capstan rope and go out to the cow pasture and dig up a big tree and let my cow drag it here. We'll play she's a team of oxen.”

Well, we got to fighting about who would drive the team of oxen and who would ride on the tree, and we forgot all about being ashamed of pulling up the stump. We took a spade and the axe, and went out to the pasture, but when we saw how big a big tree was, we guessed we'd get one that wasn't so big, and then we guessed we'd get one that wasn't as big as that, because Swatty said he didn't want his cow to strain herself pulling it. So the one we got wasn't very big, after all, but it was more of a tree than that old rotten stump was. It was a willow tree. We got a willow tree after we'd tried to dig up the roots of an elm tree. Swatty said that a willow tree didn't need any roots.

The cow didn't like pulling a tree very well, but she got used to it before we got home—only we couldn't ride on such a little tree. We had to take turns being the ox-driver. But we got home all right and dug a hole where the old stump had been, and we planted the tree. She looked bully. She looked almost like a real tree. So then I went into the house to get my grandmother, to show her, so she wouldn't feel so bad about the old stump.

I guess she had forgotten all about it. She was sitting by the window, reading the limber-backed psalm-book, and when I came in she looked up and smiled.

“Come on out in the yard, Ladylove,” I said. “I want to show you what me and Bony and Swatty did.”

She closed the psalm-book with her glasses inside and put the book on her sewing-table and went with me. I took her right to where the tree was.

“There!” I said. “Me and Bony and Swatty planted a new tree for you where that old stump was.”

THE STUMP

My grandmother looked at the tree. Her eyes were full of tears again, but they weren't the kind that worried me. She held out a hand toward the tree and said some more poetry:

Well, it wasn't an apple tree, but I didn't care, and neither did Swatty or Bony. I was just glad because Ladylove was glad, and I guessed she knew it wasn't an apple tree, because when you use poetry you have to use the kind there is, and it don't always fit. But this one fitted close enough to show how happy Ladylove was. She was very happy, and when she had said the verses she laughed and kissed Swatty's hand, and then Bony's and then mine, and took her skirt in two hands and made us a curtsy and went away as happy as anything. I felt pretty good.

So just then my father came home, because it was supper-time. He came into the yard, and he walked across the grass to where we were. He looked sort of sober, the way fathers do when they want to know what their sons have been doing.

“What's that?” he asked, short.

“It's a capstan,” I said. “Me and Bony and Swatty made it.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I don't know. Maybe nothing.”

“Hm! And what is this tree doing here?”

“Why—” I said, and then I didn't know what to say.

“Why, there was an old stump here,” said Swatty, “and we pulled it up with the capstan, and Ladylove, she came out, and she felt pretty bad—” “She couldn't remember it wasn't a tree #ny more,” said Bony.

“And so we went and got a tree and planted it for her,” I said.

My father looked at me. Then he turned away. “Don't do any damage with that capstan thing,” he said, and that was all.

Well, nobody said anything at supper, so after supper I went out and sat on the porch, and Herb Schwartz had come over to talk with Fan awhile and they were there too. So pretty soon my father came out and lighted a cigar and gave Herb one. Then my mother came out and I guessed I would go into the back yard or somewhere, because I knew she would tell my father about what Mrs. Martin had lied about me hurting her crazy boy. So I went and sat on the woodshed step awhile, because if my father was going to lick me he would do it out there anyway.

But he didn't come, so after a while I went around front again. I stopped by the vines at the end of the porch, because my father was talking.

“And I will tell you something else,” he was saying. So he told them about the stump, and how we had pulled it up and then gone and got another tree because Ladylove felt so bad about it. “And Mrs. Martin nor any one else need tell me that a boy that would do that would torment a crippled child,” my father said. “I think I know my son George fairly well. What did George say about it?”

“He said Mrs. Martin—lied,” said my mother. “And she probably did,” said my father. “Unintentionally but none the less wickedly. I am going to see her. I think she is going to apologize.”

So I felt bully about that, and my father went down the walk and mother went into the house. I felt bully because father was right. Only I was n't the one that thought of planting the new tree. That was Swatty. But I guess I'd have thought of it if Swatty hadn't.

I was just going to go up on the porch when Fan said something. What she said was:

“Poor father! The way he lets Georgie behave and then stands up for him!”

“Why, Fan,” Herb said, “you don't think George did anything of the sort Mrs. Martin said, do you?”

“I wouldn't put it beyond him,” Fan said.

“That's not fair! That's unjust!” Herb said.

“Oh! I'm unfair, am I? I'm unjust, am I?” Fan flared up.

“You are if you say such things about George,” Herb said, and he said it out flat, too, as if he meant it.

“Oh!” Fan said. “The last time I was jealous. Now I am unjust! I'm sure I thank you for your opinion of me—”

“And, now, Frances,” said Herb, standing up because Fan was, “you are unfair and unjust to me. Either that or frivolous.”

“Oh!” Fan cried out and she slung something on the porch that bounced and rolled. It came through the vines and to where I was, and I picked it up. It was her engagement ring, but she didn't care where it went, because she went slamming into the house, and Herb went stamping to the gate and out of the yard.

So I stood there and looked at the ring and felt pretty sick, because it was just because Herb thought I wasn't a liar and a mean cripple-torturer that he had stood up for me. And, just because I was n't, his wedding was off again and nobody could tell when me and Swatty would get his tricycle.