Add to all this the fact that every one of youth’s countless misfortunes is a hopeless black tragedy in its victim’s eyes, and perhaps you will understand why boyhood is not a ceaseless delight. If any man of thirty-six were subjected to the tyranny, the terrors, the bitter dependence, the unescapable and heavy penalties for petty faults that encompass the average half-grown boy, he would go insane in a night. There is no appeal, no way out, for the boy who is in a scrape. For a man, in such trouble, there are fifty exits.
Small wonder that so many lads yearn for a chance to make their own way in the world, and that they shrink in loathing from the proposed college course which will keep them in penniless slavery during four more endless years!
They have not yet the wit to understand that the so-called Higher Education is often a pompously windy fetish; whose chief advantage consists in the fact that it enables its possessors to look down on its non-possessors.
This philosophy is faulty, of course. It is also non-essential to the story; except that it throws a light on Arnon Flint’s mental processes as he stood there, the hated money-satchel at his feet, trying to keep his balance on the crowded rear platform of the trolley-car.
People were forever boarding or leaving the car. A dozen times, Arnon was shoved from one spot to another as his fellow-standees milled and jostled about him. Always, with his toe, he managed to push the satchel to his new standing place. He could not stoop to pick it up. The platform was too crowded. He could not even stoop down far enough to keep his eye on the bag. But he kept in constant touch with it by means of his boot-toe.
At the ball-ground gate, on the outskirts of the town, three-fourths of the passengers debarked. As the car started on, its rear platform was empty except for Arnon and the conductor and a sawdusty man in overalls.
Breathing was easier now. So was standing. A few blocks farther on, a woman got out, leaving a seat vacant on the rear bench. Arnon spied the seat and prepared to take it. As a preliminary, he bent to pick up the satchel from between his toes.
“Drop that, sonny!” exhorted the sawdusty man in overalls.
At the same moment Arnon was aware that his fingers had met around a canvas strap and not around the satchel’s leathern handle. He peered down, in dull amaze.
Between his feet was a carpenter’s kit. The money-bag was nowhere in sight.