“No,” I said.
“Did Swatty tell his brother Herbert?” she asked.
“No. Nobody has told anybody,” I said.
Well, me and Swatty felt pretty bad and scared and sick, and one reason was that Bony stopped playing with us. His father found out about the Red Avengers and made him promise he wouldn't play with me and Swatty any more because we were bad boys and would ruin Bony. So we never expected to play with Bony again, but we did, and this was how it happened.
Bony's father and mother used to fight like everybody else, and about bills, because they were having a fight like that when Bony's father took the shotgun and went away from home. I guess it was a hat Bony's mother had bought that was the worst, but Bony wasn't sure. He said they began to fight when the grocery bill came and fought harder and harder the more bills there were, but it wasn't until the hat bill came that Bony's father stopped sassing back, and got solemn and quiet and said that sometimes he felt that it was no use trying to keep up the struggle against poverty and starvation, and that sometimes when these evidences of extravagance came in he felt just like going off somewhere by himself and ending everything. So then Bony's mother said, “Oh! nonsense!” and pretty soon Bony's father got his shotgun and went out of the house.
So Bony just sat there in the room expecting every minute to hear the shotgun and to run out and see his father dead in the stable. He sat there and pretended to be studying his geography lesson for Monday, but all he was doing was listening to hear the shot. It was a mighty mean job, I guess, sitting there listening like that, and waiting to hear his father kill himself; but he didn't hear anything.
So pretty soon he shut up his hook and sort of tiptoed out of the house, but he did not dare go near the stable. He didn't know what to do. He went out on the front steps and stood there, and pretty soon he saw me and Swatty at the corner, and he waved to us and came running, and we waited for him.
It was January, but it wasn't cold because we were having a thaw. It was good snow to make snowballs of, so when Bony started to come toward us we made a few snowballs and just threw them at him. I guess we hit him five or six times, but he didn't beller for us to stop, like he usually does; he put his arm in front of his face and came right on. When he got too close for us to throw at him any more we stopped and then we saw he was crying.
“Aw, shut up and don't be a baby!” Swatty said; “we didn't hurt you.” But Bony kept right on bawling. He didn't bawl the way a cowardy-calf bawls when he gets hurt, he bawled like—well, I guess he bawled like a fellow bawls when his father has gone off with a shotgun to shoot himself. So then we didn't tell him to shut up any more. Swatty said:
“What's the matter, Bony?”