“Who struck the first blow?” says Miss Muiphy.
Well, everybody told her Swatty did, which was the truth, and she let me go.
“Just as I thought, you—you little bulldozer,” she said, shaking him. “You've been getting entirely too uppish of late, young man. You think you can take advantage of—of circumstances; but I'll teach you a thing or two. Get into school there, and wash yourself, and see that you are in your seat when the bell rings.”
So Swatty did it. Me and the Bony Highlander stayed out till the bell rung, and then we went in, too, and as we went past Swatty's desk he whispered, “She thinks she's going to lick me, but she ain't.”
“Bet she does, if she said so,” I says; and I bet she would, too. So did the Bony Highlander, because we knew she was the sort that would rather lick a fellow than not.
Well, that was in the morning, and they never lick at noon because the way some fellows wriggle and twist it takes a long time to lick them, and it would use up the noon hour. So they lick after school in the afternoon when there is plenty of time. So me and the Bony Highlander waited for Swatty, and we tried to scare him. We told him we bet Miss Murphy would make him holler, because she licked with a rawhide pony switch and whipped on the legs where the switch would wrap around and sting, but we couldn't get Swatty to even pretend he might holler. He said no teacher in the world could make him holler. We all said it. Or, I don't know whether the Bony Highlander said it or not. He'd never been licked in school. He wasn't the kind that gets licked, somehow. But he was a pretty nice fellow, anyway. We liked him just as well, but not as well as Swatty and me liked each other of course, because me and Swatty was cow-cousins.
Me and Swatty was both raised on the milk of the same cow, but it was Schwartzes' cow, and when I was being raised on it Herb Schwartz used to fetch the milk around, the way Swatty does now. I guess that's how Herb got to know Fan. But the Bony Highlander was just a kid that moved into the neighborhood.
His name wasn't really Bony Highlander, but we called him that because when he was reading a piece of poetry out of the Reader in school, and ought to have said “bonny Highlander,” he said “bony Highlander.” But we mostly called him Bony for short, like we called Schwartzy Swatty for short. He was all right, but he never started to do things; he just went along when we did them, and waited on the outside of the fence, and things like that.
Well, we waited on the corner for Swatty that afternoon until the bell rung but he didn't come, so we went along, and he was at school already, and after he had stayed in to be licked and Miss Murphy let him out, he told us why he went early. He knew where she kept her rawhide, in the closet at the end of the room on the shelf where the chalk boxes were, and he went early at noon and took his pocket-knife and cut the rawhide into little pieces about an inch long. He laid them all out on the shelf in a row, and he said he nearly died laughing when she went to pick it up and it was all in pieces. So Miss Murphy went to get another rawhide from another teacher, but everybody had gone home, and she told Swatty she would tend to him to-morrow.
“I'd rather have been licked to-day and then I'd be done with it,” I said, but Swatty didn't say so.