IN the course of the next few days Dan decided that there was no danger of trouble from the hands. Things settled back into their accustomed rut. He was only a little less popular, perhaps.

He was indebted to Clarence for the first warning he received as to what was in store for him.

It came about in this way. Clarence had retired to the yards, where, secure from observation, he was indulging in a quiet smoke, furtively keeping an eye open for McClintock, whose movements were uncertain, as he knew from sad experience.

A high board fence was in front of him, shutting off the yards from the lower end of the town. At his back was a freight car, back of that again were the interlacing tracks, and beyond them a cornfield and Billup's Fork, with its inviting shade of sycamores and willows and its tempting swimming-holes.

Suddenly he heard a scrambling on the opposite side of the fence, and ten brown fingers clutched the tops of the boards, then a battered straw hat came on a level with the fingers, at the same instant a bare foot and leg were thrown over the fence, and the owner of the battered straw hat swung himself into view. All this while a dog whined and yelped; then followed a vigorous scratching sound, and presently a small, dilapidated-looking yellow cur squeezed itself beneath the fence. Clarence recognized the intruders. It was Branyon's boy, Augustus, commonly called “Spide,” because of his exceeding slimness and the length of his legs, and his dog Pink.

As soon as Branyon's boy saw Clarence he balanced himself deftly on the top of the fence with one hand and shaded his eyes elaborately with the other. An amiable, if toothless, smile curled his lips. When he spoke it was with deep facetiousness.

“Hi! come out from behind that roll of paper!”

But Clarence said not a word. He puffed away at his cigarette, apparently oblivious of everything save the contentment it gave him, and as he puffed Spide's mouth worked and watered sympathetically. His secret admiration was tremendous. Here was Clarence in actual and undisturbed possession of a whole cigarette. He had to purchase his cigarettes in partnership with some other boy, and go halves on the smoking of them. It made him feel cheap and common.

“Say I got one of them coffin-tacks that ain't working?” he inquired. Clarence gazed off up the tracks, ignoring the question and the questioner. Spide's presence was balm to his soul. But as one of the office force of the Buckhom and Antioch he felt a certain lofty reserve to be incumbent upon him. Besides, he and Spide had been engaged in a recent rivalry for Susie Poppleton's affections. It is true he had achieved a brilliant success over his rival, but that a mere school-boy should have ventured to oppose him, a salaried man, had struck him as an unpardonable piece of impertinence for which there could be no excuse.

Spide, however, had taken the matter most philosophically. He had recognized that he could not hope to compete with a youth who possessed unlimited wealth, which he was willing to lay out on chewing-gum and candy, his experience being that the sex was strictly mercenary and incapable of a disinterested love. Of course he had much admired Miss Poppleton; from the crown of her small dark head, with its tightly braided “pig-tails,” down to her trim little foot he had esteemed her as wholly adorable; but, after all, his affair of the heart had been an affair of the winter only. With the coming of summer he had found more serious things to think of. He was learning to swim and to chew tobacco. The mastering of these accomplishments pretty well occupied his time.

“Say!” he repeated, “got another?”

Still Clarence blinked at the fierce sunlight which danced on the rails, and said nothing. Spide slid skilfully down from his perch, but his manner had undergone a change.

“Who throwed that snipe away, anyhow?” he asked, disdainfully. Clarence turned his eyes slowly in his direction.

“Lookee here. You fellows got to keep out of these yards, or I'll tell McClintock. First we know some of you kids will be getting run over, and then your folks will set up a lively howl. Get on out! It ain't no place for little boys!”

He put the cigarette between his lips and took a deep and tantalizing pull at it. Spide kept to his own side of the ditch that ran between the fence and the tracks.

“Huh!” with infinite scorn. “Who's a kid? You won't be happy till I come over there and lick you!”

“First thing I know you'll be stealing scrap iron!”

“My gosh! The Huckleberry'd have to stop running if I swiped a coupling-pin!”

Clarence had recourse to the cigarette, and again Spide was consumed with torturing jealousies. “Where did you shoot that snipe, anyhow?” he inquired, insultingly.

Once more Clarence allowed his glance to stray off up the tracks.

“For half a cent I'd come across and do what I say!” added Spide, stooping down to roll up his trousers leg, and then easing an unelastic “gallus” that cut his shoulders. This elicited a short and contemptuous grunt from Clarence. He was well pleased with himself. He felt Spide's envy. It was sweet and satisfying.

“Say!” with sudden animation. “You fellers will be going around on your uppers in a day or so. I'll bet you'd give a heap to know what I know!”

“I wouldn't give a darned cent to know all you know or ever will know!” retorted Clarence, promptly.

“Some people's easily upset here in the cupola,” tapping his brimless covering. “I wouldn't want to give you brain-fever; I don't hate you bad enough.”

“Well, move on. You ain't wanted around here. It may get me into trouble if I'm seen fooling away my time on you.”

“I hope to hell it will,” remarked Branyon's boy, Augustus, with cordial ill-will and fluent profanity. He was not a good little boy. He himself would have been the first to spurn the idea of personal sanctity. But he was literally bursting with the importance of the facts which he possessed, and Clarence's indifference gave him no opening.

“What will you bet there ain't a strike?”

“I ain't betting this morning,” said Clarence, blandly. “But if there is one we are ready for it. You bet the hands won't catch us napping. We are ready for 'em any time and all the time.” This, delivered with a large air, impressed Spide exceedingly.

“Have you sent for the militia a'ready?” he asked, anxiously.

“That's saying,” noting the effect of his words. “I can't go blabbing about, telling what the road's up to, but we are awake, and the hands will get it in the neck if they tackle the boss. He's got dam little use for laboring men, anyhow.”

To Clarence, Oakley was the most august person he had ever known. He religiously believed his position to be only second in point of importance and power to that of the President of the United States.

He was wont to invest him with purely imaginary attributes, and to lie about him at a great rate among his comrades, who were ready to credit any report touching a man who was reputed to be able to ride on the cars without a ticket. Human grandeur had no limits beyond this.

“There was a meeting last night. I bet you didn't know that,” said Spide.

“I heard something of it. Was your father at the meeting, Spide?” he asked, dropping his tone of hostility for one of gracious familiarity. The urchin promptly crossed the ditch and stood at his side.

“Of course the old man was. You don't suppose he wouldn't be in it?”

“Oh, well, let 'em kick. You see the boss is ready for 'em,” remarked Clarence, indifferently. He wanted to know what Spide knew, but he didn't feel that he could afford to show any special interest. “Where you going—swimming?” he added.

“Yep.” But Spide was not ready to drop the fascinating subject of the strike. He wished to astonish Clarence, who was altogether too knowing.

“The meeting was in the room over Jack Britt's saloon,” he volunteered.

“I suppose you think we didn't know that up at the office. We got our spies out. There ain't nothing the hands can do we ain't on to.”

Spide wrote his initials in the soft bank of the ditch with his big toe, while he meditated on what he could tell next.

“Well, sir, you'd 'a' been surprised if you'd 'a' been there.”

“Was you there, Spide?”

“Yep.”

“Oh, come off; you can't stuff me.”

“I was, too, there. The old lady sent me down to fetch pap home. She was afraid he'd get full. Joe Stokes was there, and Lou Bentick, and a whole slew of others, and Griff Ryder.”

Clarence gasped with astonishment. “Why, he ain't one of the hands.”

“Well, he's on their side.”

“What you giving us?”

“Say, they are going to make a stiff kick on old man Oakley working in the shops. They got it in for him good and strong.” He paused to weigh the effect of this, and then went on rapidly: “He's done something. Ryder knows about it. He told my old man and Joe Stokes. They say he's got to get out. What's a convicted criminal, anyhow?”

“What do you want to know that for, Spide?” questioned the artful Clarence, with great presence of mind.

“Well, that's what old man Oakley is. I heard Ryder say so myself, and pap and Joe Stokes just kicked themselves because they hadn't noticed it before, I suppose. My! but they were hot! Say, you'll see fun to-morrow. I shouldn't be surprised if they sent you all a-kiting.”

Clarence was swelling with the desire to tell Oakley what he had heard. He took the part of a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

“Have one?” he said.

Spide promptly availed himself of his companion's liberality.

“Well, so long,” the latter added. “I got to get back,” and a moment later he might have been seen making his way cautiously in the direction of the office, while Spide, his battered hat under his arm, and the cigarette clutched in one hand, was skipping gayly across the cornfield towards the creek followed by Pink. He was bound for the “Slidy,” a swimming-hole his mother had charged him on no account to visit. Under these peculiar circumstances it was quite impossible for him to consider any other spot. Nowhere else was the shade so cool and dense, nowhere else did the wild mint scent the summer air with such seductive odors, and nowhere else were such social advantages to be found.

There were always big boys hanging about the “Slidy” who played cards and fished and loafed, but mostly loafed, because it was the easiest, and here Mr. Tink Brown, Jeffy's logical successor and unofficial heir apparent, held court from the first of June to the last of August. The charm of his society no respectable small boy was able to withstand. His glittering indecencies made him a sort of hero, and his splendid lawless state was counted worthy of emulation.

But Spide discovered that the way of the transgressor is sometimes as hard as the moralists would have us believe.

It was the beginning of the season, and a group of boys, in easy undress, were clustered on the bank above the swimming-hole. They were “going in” as soon as an important question should be decided.

The farmer whose fields skirted Billup's Fork at this point usually filled in the “Slidy” every spring with bits of rusty barb-wire and osage-orange cuttings. The youth of Antioch who were prejudiced maintained that he did it to be mean, but the real reason was that he wished to discourage the swimmers, who tramped his crops and stole his great yellow pumpkins to play with in the water.

The time-honored method of determining the condition of the hole was beautifully simple. It was to catch a small boy and throw him in, and until this rite was performed the big boys used the place but gingerly. Mr. Brown and his friends were waiting for this small boy to happen along, when the unsuspecting Spide ran down the bank. He was promptly seized by the mighty Tink.

“Been in yet, Spide?” asked his captor, genially.

“Nope.”

“Then this is your chance.” Whereat Spide began to cry. He didn't want to go in. All at once he remembered he had promised his mother he wouldn't and that his father had promised him a licking if he did—two excellent reasons why he should stay out—but Tink only pushed him towards the water's edge.

“You're hurting me! Lemme alone, you big loafer! Lemme go, or I'll tell the old man on you!” and he scratched and clawed, but Tink merely laughed, and the other boys advised him to “chuck the little shaver in.”

“Lemme take off my shirt and pants! Lemme take off my pants—just my pants, Tink!” he entreated.

But he was raised on high and hurled out into the stream where the sunlight flashed among the shadows cast by the willows. His hat went one way and his cigarette another. Pink was considerately tossed after him, and all his earthly possessions were afloat.

There was a splash, and he disappeared from sight to reappear a second later, with streaming hair and dripping face.

“How is it?” chorussed the big boys, who were already pulling off their clothes, as they saw that neither barb-wire nor osage-orange brush festooned the swimmer.

“Bully!” ecstatically, and he dived dexterously into the crown of his upturned hat, which a puff of wind had sent dancing gayly down-stream.