“Do you know who threw it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who?”
“Me,” replied Oliver October, and was suddenly thrilled by the thought of George Washington and the cherry tree.
“Well, you must never do it again,” said his father mildly. Then, in his most jovial manner: “Pass up your plate, sonny, and let me give you some more of this steak. It will make you strong.”
CHAPTER VIII
GLIDING OVER A FEW YEARS
It is not the purpose of the narrator of this story to deal at length with the deeds, exploits, mishaps and sensations of Oliver October as a child. Pages, even reams, could be written—and certainly not wasted—in recording the innumerable adventures that befell him between his tenth and seventeenth years.
If time and space permitted, it would be a pleasure to tell how he learned to swim and dance, to drive an automobile, and to play the mandolin and the allied instruments of torture comprising a trap drummer’s outfit; how he felt when he put on his first pair of long pants; how he earned his first dollar; how he headed an expedition to dig for gold in the ravine reaching out from the upper end of Death Swamp; how he organized the far-famed band of robbers that twice came to grief before reforming—once in Mr. Higgins’s watermelon patch and later on in the vicinity of Mr. Whistler’s bee hives; how he fell in love with pretty Miss Somers, the high-school teacher, and couldn’t keep his mind on his studies; how he performed the common miracle of changing himself from an untidy, dirty-faced boy into a painfully immaculate personage with plastered hair, well-brushed garments, soap-scoured hands, and an astonishing tendency to turn scarlet when he most desired to be complacently pallid; how he screwed up the courage to ask his best girl—at that time a very tall and angular maiden named Jennie Torbeck—to go with him to the theater up at the county seat, and how he lost all affection for her and was miserably disillusioned when she coughed all through the performance and caused people to crane their necks and scowl at them.
In short, how he grew up to be five feet eleven inches tall and stripped at one hundred and seventy pounds of absolutely healthy bone and tissue.