Toady was a new kid in town, because his father had come to Riverbank to start a store. We never said Toady could be one of our crowd and we never wanted him to be, but he just joined on because he felt like it. That's the kind of boy he was. He thought anybody would be tickled to death to have him be around with them. He wasn't a fat boy, but he was a plump one, and his breeches always fit him so close they were like the skin on a horse; when he wrinkled they wrinkled. He wore shoes in summer. He looked all the time like company come to visit, and I guess that was one reason we didn't care for him much.
The reason we called him Toady was because of his eyes. They popped out like a frog's eyes, sort of like brown marbles, and the more he talked the more they popped out. When he talked he couldn't do anything else but talk. Swatty could lie on his stomach and chew an apple and play mumblety-peg and kick a hole in the sod with one toe and talk, all at one time, but Toady couldn't. He had to sit up straight and pop his eyes out. When he got started talking you could cut in and say, “Was your grandmother a monkey?” and he'd say, “Yes,” as if he hadn't heard, and go right on talking. He wouldn't fight, like me and Swatty, and sometimes Bony, would. If you thought it was time to have a fight with him and pitched into him he would bend down and turn his back and let you mailer him until you got through. But, mostly, he would talk somehow so you wouldn't want to fight him. That's no way for a boy to talk. It's the way girls talk. Or preachers.
Toady didn't get Mamie Little for his girl the right way. He never said she wasn't his girl, he just said she was. The right way is that when the other fellows find out he has a girl they holler at him: “Mamie Little is Georgie's girl! Mamie Little is Georgie's girl!” And he has to get mad and fight them about it to prove it's a lie, but after he has fought enough to prove she isn't his girl, why, then she is his girl and he can have her for his girl and nobody hollers it at him. So then she is the one he chooses to kiss when they play “Post-Office” or “Copenhagen” at parties, and if he's got anything to give her he gives it to her, like snail shells or a better slate pencil than she has, and such things. So it's pretty nice, and you feel pretty good about it and are glad she's your girl.
Well, a short while before Toady Williams came to our town they had an election to see whether the state was to be prohibition or not, and all the school children whose fathers were prohibition paraded; so Mamie Little paraded because her father had the prohibition newspaper in Riverbank, and I paraded because Mamie did and my father didn't care whether there was prohibition or not. Swatty didn't parade because his father was a German tailor, and when he felt like a glass of beer he wanted to have it, and every fall Swatty's mother made grape wine out of wild grapes that me and Swatty got from the vines in the bottom across the Mississippi. When they had the election, prohibition was elected all over the state, but not in Riverbank; but we had to have it in Riverbank because the state elected it.
Of course I was prohibition, because I had paraded and because Mamie Little was, but Swatty was antiprohibition. I didn't say a thing to make Swatty mad; all I said was: “Huh! You thought you was so smart, didn't you? You thought prohibition was going to get licked, but it was you got licked. Next time you won't be so smart. I guess you and your father feel pretty sick about it.”
“Don't you say anything about my father!” Swatty said.
“I'll say he was licked, because he was licked,” I said.
So Swatty pulled off his coat and I pulled off mine, and we had a good fight. He licked me because he always did; and when he was sitting on my ribs and had his knees on my arms so I couldn't do anything, he asked me if I had had enough, and I said I had. Because I had had.
“I guess I showed you how much the prohibitions can lick the anti-prohibitions!” he said.
“Let me up,” I said.