[CHAPTER XIII]
HARD LINES
“Though losses, and crosses,
Be lessons right severe—,
There’s wit there, ye’ll get there,
Ye’ll find nae other where.”
BROWN'S sodas are the best in town, if they do come high,—and the girls know it," Miss Billy had jeered a few weeks before. Theodore repeated the words now with a wholly sober grimace, as he scrambled into his clothes at half past six of an early July morning. Vacation had brought him a permanent position in the drug store, at four dollars a week, but the skeleton still walked. It was not a very hideous skeleton, to be sure,—just a half dozen or so of remarkably round and robust young misses,—but it had a prodigious appetite for the confection known as ice-cream soda, and it never happened to have any money of its own.
Theodore, red in the face from the growing heat and his hurried exertions, frowningly continued his unpleasant reflections.
"There are two or three of those girls that have treated me contemptibly of late,—probably because I no longer live in a fourteen-room house. That Myrtle Blanchard is a notable example. She scarcely takes the trouble to see me on the street, but she manages to get around to the soda fountain every day, either alone, or with the crowd of girls."
He was lacing his shoes now, and another side of the subject presented itself.
"These are the shoes I vowed to buy with my own earnings, or go without. Father bought them. I've learned to crow before my tail feathers have grown enough to tell whether I'm going to be a Brahma rooster or a Bantam hen. Well, I'm through cackling now: anyway, till I get rid of those girls, and save some money. Then I'll have something to cackle over."
He swung down to breakfast, taking time to eat only his "bale of hay"—the shredded wheat biscuit the faithful Maggie put before him,—and hurried off to work. At the gate he encountered John Thomas Hennesy, going his way, with a broken bridle in his hand.