On the evening before the day of the clinic, when Billy was driving home, he overtook the “Home boy” trudging up to the village to get what little social color he could from the gossip of the regular store roosters. He climbed into the car with his accustomed sullenness—or what was generally considered sullenness. Billy knew it was only a painful self-consciousness dulled a little by dragging dog-tiredness. He was breathing audibly through his distorted mouth, and his deafness gave a stupid look to his face.
“Why don’t you come up to our Junior Farmers’ meetings?” the Representative began.
The boy didn’t look up.
“They ain’t for the likes of me,” he said.
“Of course they are,” the Representative declared, warmly. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t mean that your fellows are snobs,” the boy admitted, “but there’s a difference, and
you know it. They’re used to being out. They can make speeches and talk, and me—I can’t talk.”
Billy had never realized before how the boy’s pride had suffered through his affliction. He wondered if the school clinic would admit him; or, what would be more difficult, whether he could persuade him to go. He made the proposition as tactfully as he could.
“I don’t belong there, neither,” the boy replied. “I’ve never gone to school, and, anyway, I ain’t in the same class. I don’t know any of the folks except the men I meet at threshin’s. Jim that come out here the same time I did, it’s different with him. At the place where he works, they don’t make much difference by him. But the folks at the Home thinks if they once gets us out to what they call the ‘green country,’ they’ve sort of landed us in ’eaven. Men send in for ‘a boy to do chores,’ but we know it’s a hired man they want. ‘Course it’s different with Jim, but then I’m different to Jim. If you can’t talk an’ you can’t hear, an’ your mouth hangs open, you can’t expect folks to want you around more-n-s necessary.”
Billy had never tried so hard to argue anyone out of a mistaken idea. His own experience had given him an insight into a boy’s sensitiveness at the time when life is opening a strange world to him, and he needs a confidant, and he had