"I've been thinkin', Kiddy, that since yer used to be a State ward, yer'll have to be a State ward agin, if the State knows you're knockin' round loose."
The boy cried out in alarm. "Oh, but I won't be. I'll kill myself first."
He could not understand this antipathy, this horror. In a mechanical way the State had been good to him. The Tollivants had been good to him, too, in the sense that they had not been unkind. But he could not return to the status. It was the status that dismayed him. In Harfrey it had made him the single low-caste individual in a prim and high-caste world, giving everyone the right to disdain him. They couldn't help disdaining him. They knew as well as he did that in principle he was a boy like any other; but by all the customs of their life he was a little pariah. Herding with thieves and murderers, it was still possible to respect himself; but to go back and hang on to the outer fringe of the organized life of a Christian society would have ravaged him within. He said so to Honeybun energetically.
"That's the way I figured that yer'd feel. So long as you're on'y waitin'—or yer can say that you're on'y waitin'—till yer pop comes back, it won't matter much. It'll be when school begins that it'll go agin yer. There's sure to be some pious woman sneepin' round that'll tell someone as you're not in school when you're o' school age, and then, me lad, yer'll be back as a State ward on some down-homer's farm."
Tom lashed the bed in the darkness. "I won't go! I won't go!"
"That's what I used to say the first few times they pinched me; but yer'll jolly well have to go if they send yer. Now what I was thinkin' is this. It's in New York State that yer'd be a State ward. If you was out o' this State there'd be all kinds o' laws that couldn't git yer back again. Onst when I'd been doin' a bit o' socializin' in New Jersey, and slipped back to Manhattan—well, you wouldn't believe the fuss it took to git me across the river when the p'lice got wind it was me. Never got me back at all! Thing died out before they was able to fix up all the coulds and couldn'ts of the lor."
He allowed the boy to think this over before going on with his suggestion.
"Now if you and me was to light out together to another State, they wouldn't notice that we'd gone before we was safe beyond their clutches. If we was to go to Boston, say! Boston's a good town. I worked Boston onst, me and a chap named...."
The boy felt called on to speak. "I wouldn't be a socialist, not if it gave me all Boston for my own."
The statement, coming as it did, had the vigor of an ultimatum. Though but a repetition of what he had said a few days before, it was a repetition with more force. It was also with more significance, fundamentally laying down a condition which need not be discussed again.