The door closed softly behind her, and the body of Penrod, from the hips upward, rose invisibly in the complete darkness of the bedchamber. A moment later the hot-water bag reached the floor in as noiseless a manner as that previously adopted by the remains of the little pill, and Penrod once more bespread his soul with poppies. This time he slept until the breakfast-bell rang.
He was late to school, and at once found himself in difficulties. Government demanded an explanation of the tardiness; but Penrod made no reply of any kind. Taciturnity is seldom more strikingly out of place than under such circumstances, and the penalties imposed took account not only of Penrod's tardiness but of his supposititious defiance of authority in declining to speak. The truth was that Penrod did not know why he was tardy, and, with mind still lethargic, found it impossible to think of an excuse his continuing silence being due merely to the persistence of his efforts to invent one. Thus were his meek searchings misinterpreted, and the unloved hours of improvement in science and the arts made odious.
“They'll SEE!” he whispered sorely to himself, as he bent low over his desk, a little later. Some day he would “show 'em”. The picture in his mind was of a vast, vague assembly of people headed by Miss Spence and the superior pupils who were never tardy, and these multitudes, representing persecution and government in general, were all cringing before a Penrod Schofield who rode a grim black horse up and down their miserable ranks, and gave curt orders.
“Make 'em step back there!” he commanded his myrmidons savagely. “Fix it so's your horses'll step on their feet if they don't do what I say!” Then, from his shining saddle, he watched the throngs slinking away. “I guess they know who I am NOW!”
CHAPTER XI. THE TONIC
These broodings helped a little; but it was a severe morning, and on his way home at noon he did not recover heart enough to practice the bullfrog's croak, the craft that Sam Williams had lately mastered to inspiring perfection. This sonorous accomplishment Penrod had determined to make his own. At once guttural and resonant, impudent yet plaintive, with a barbaric twang like the plucked string of a Congo war-fiddle, the sound had fascinated him. It is made in the throat by processes utterly impossible to describe in human words, and no alphabet as yet produced by civilized man affords the symbols to vocalize it to the ear of imagination. “Gunk” is the poor makeshift that must be employed to indicate it.
Penrod uttered one half-hearted “Gunk” as he turned in at his own gate. However, this stimulated him, and he paused to practice. “Gunk!” he croaked. “Gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk!”
Mrs. Schofield leaned out of an open window upstairs.
“Don't do that, Penrod,” she said anxiously. “Please don't do that.”