“Pshaw!” laughed Sidney, “it’s always a relative that you don’t know about or have forgotten that does that sort of thing. Anyway, that’s the way it is in the stories!”
School began a few days later and Tom went back to lessons again. He was a sophomore this year, and Sidney was a junior. Tom had more and harder work to do than last year, but it went easier, probably because he had learned how to apply himself to study. With the beginning of the school year football came into its own again. Sidney was out for his old place at right-end on the high school eleven and, although now and then he allowed himself to be beguiled into pitching and catching with Tom, his visits to the open lot after dinner were usually made with a football tucked under his arm. He showed Tom how to punt and drop-kick and catch and throw, but Tom’s heart was not in it and all the time he was chasing the elusive pigskin his hands were itching for a baseball. Sidney, however, declared that there was plenty of time for baseball when spring came again and was so full of football that he had time for little else.
At the store Tom had stocked up thoroughly with all the implements and apparel of the game and the sporting goods department did a rushing business in footballs, head-guards, shoes, canvas suits, shirts, and sweaters. The grammar school outfitted its team anew and Tom secured the contract for the togs, while from neighbouring towns mail-orders came in every day. In October he sent in his orders for winter goods: sleds, toboggans, skiis, snowshoes, skates, and hockey supplies. When, shortly after Thanksgiving, Amesville had its first snowstorm, Tom, with Mr. Cummings’s sanction, took possession of one entire window and stayed up half of the night dressing it.
With packing cases and boards from the basement he built up an elevation at one back corner and covered it and the floor of the window as well with sheets of cotton-batting. Over this he sprinkled powdered mica. Four evergreen shrubs in tubs were borrowed and placed at the back. (“Evergreens from Davis the Florist, 163 Main Street,” was the inscription which adorned them.) Then Tom arranged his exhibit. A toboggan with a stunning red cushion was tilted down the incline, skiis and sleds were displayed enticingly, at the back, hockey sticks were crossed and pucks laid at the intersections, and a row of skates made a border along the front. Snow-shoes with brave scarlet tassels were there, too, while more colour was supplied to the frosty scene by gaudy toboggan caps, madly-hued Mackinaw jackets, and high-school and grammar-school pennants. Tom had had the idea of that window in mind a long time and so there was no hesitation when the opportunity came. Even so, however, it was after one o’clock when he went outside to stand in the snowstorm and take a final, admiring view of the result. It was, he decided, well worth the trouble and the loss of slumber, and he put the lights out, locked up, and trudged home, through four inches of feathery snow, well content. That window display caused much interest and comment. Even the papers called attention to it, and as long as the snow lasted rows of small red noses were pressed daily against the panes while the eager eyes of small boys gazed covetously on the contents and youthful hearts doubtless longed for the advent of Christmas.
Meanwhile the High School Football Team was doing brave deeds and winning many laurels. Tom got an afternoon off when the final and most important game of the year was played and had his first real experience of football from the spectator’s viewpoint. He got awfully excited when, at the end of the second period, Petersburg was four points ahead, and far more excited when, just as the game was drawing to its close and defeat for Amesville seemed certain, there came a forward pass, a final desperate attempt on the part of the Brown-and-Blue, and Sidney, taking the ball far over on the side of the field, raced and dodged and tore his way through the Petersburg army and landed the pigskin seven yards from the goal-line! Nothing could stop Amesville then! Three downs took her across, Captain Neely kicked the goal, and victory perched on the waving brown-and-blue banners of Amesville!
Once through with football, Sidney went as enthusiastically into hockey, mourning the period of inactivity that must elapse before Jack Frost took possession of the world and froze the ponds and streams. Sidney fulfilled his promise to show Tom how to use a hockey stick that winter, for the High School Athletic Association built by popular subscription a rink on a piece of vacant ground across the street from the school. Tom’s instruction usually took place at lunch hour, when the surface was so congested that real skating or hockey was out of the question. Tom learned quickly and Sidney declared flatteringly that he could make the team if he had the time for it.
Christmas came and went. It was a very busy season for Tom and the sporting goods department did a wonderful business. A year ago he would have laughed at the idea of there being as many sweaters in the world as Cummings and Wright sold that year in the holidays! Tom had had a factory turn out a brown coat-sweater with a broad blue band around the middle, and those went like hot cakes.
The first of the new year Tom moved from Mrs. Cleary’s to a larger and more comfortable room on Turner Street. In many ways he was sorry to leave, as sorry, perhaps, as the Clearys were to have him. But his new abode was much nearer the store and the school, the house was a better one, and his new room well furnished. Besides, he could get his meals under the same roof, which was an advantage. To be sure, it was going to cost him well over a dollar more to live each week, but now he was receiving his full wages of five dollars, for the pump had at last been fully paid for and he held Cummings and Wright’s bill-of-sale for it. He meant in the spring to take formal possession of it and have it brought to town and stored in the basement of the store, where, perhaps, it might find a purchaser. At Christmas his employers had presented him with a five-dollar gold-piece and Uncle Israel had given him the same amount, although it was in greasy one- and two-dollar bills instead of shining metal. So, on the whole, he felt quite affluent as he took possession of his new room.
It was on the front of the house and looked out into a quiet, shabby-genteel little street in which boarding-houses and small shops were indiscriminately mixed. But there were maple trees along the sidewalk and a good-sized yard at one side of the house, and, in summer, as he knew, for he had passed the house quite often on his way to school, beds of geraniums and coleus. The landlady was a grim-looking but kind-hearted elderly woman who supported a rather worthless husband. Mr. Tully was always, it seemed to Tom, looking for work and never finding it. He was a likable sort of little man, for all his failings, and he and Tom got to be good friends in the course of time. There were many roomers at Mrs. Tully’s and at dinner the long table held always a dozen or more boarders. The food was sufficient, but lacked what Tom called the “filling” qualities of Mrs. Burns’s viands. He often sighed for one of the latter woman’s beef stews with dumplings! At Mrs. Tully’s, if they had beef stew it was called something else and served in dishes so tiny that Tom mentally referred to them as “sample trays.”
The other members of the household were mostly clerks, many of them employed at Miller and Tappen’s. There was one, however, Mr. George, who had a more fascinating occupation. He was a private detective in the employ of the railroad company, although Tom did not discover this fact, which was not generally known, until he had been at Mrs. Tully’s for a month. Then it was Mr. Tully who told him. Mr. Tully liked to come to Tom’s “third-floor-front” in the evenings when Tom was at home and, occupying the easy-chair, which he grumblingly declared was the only comfortable chair in the house, put his feet on the window-ledge and fill the room with the strong, acrid smoke of his big brown meerschaum pipe. Somehow Tom didn’t mind his presence in the least and could study quite as well when Mr. Tully was sitting there in silent meditation as when he was alone. Mr. Tully was very fond of talking, especially of Mr. Tully and the things he had done in his time, but he never interfered with Tom’s studies.