“Because I don’t know how.”
“Well, learn then, we all had to.”
“It seems to me I have got enough to learn that is of more value than wrestling, besides I am the largest boy in school. How it would look to have some little fellow like George Wood, or Chuck Witham, lay me on my back, and what a row it would make; if some of the larger boys did it that would be another thing.”
“Why not do as you have done in respect to reading, writing and spelling, learn at home, wrestle with me and Bertie? We are not much, to be sure, but I can throw most of the boys, and you can learn the locks and trips, and how to guard and handle yourself, and then when you come to wrestle at school you won’t be ashamed. If grandfather was not so stiff in his legs of late years he’d take delight in learning you.”
“Your grandfather?”
“To be sure. Grandfather has been an awful wrestler in his time. I can just remember when he wrestled. After you practise with us we can get Ned Conly and Arthur Nevins to come over here and wrestle. They are capable wrestlers, and father would wrestle with you.”
“Does your father wrestle?”
“I guess he does; there’s nobody can throw him, and he never was thrown. He won’t go into a ring to wrestle at a raising or at a town meeting now, because my mother don’t want him to, but grandfather told me that was not all the reason, because mother was never willing he should go into a ring, but he always would. Grandfather says it is because he feels he’s getting a little old, and is afraid some young man would get the better of him, and that he don’t blame him for not running that risk, after he had held the ring for years against three towns, fetch on who they would.”
“Does everybody wrestle here?”
“Everybody who thinks anything of themselves; everybody but the women and the minister, and they look on. They say the minister is a first-rate wrestler, and sometimes tries a fall in his back yard with friends who come to see him. A man who can’t wrestle, is thought very little of in these parts.”