“Why, you don’t look as if you was glad to be a boy,” he said.
“I was thinking about what Mr Brownsmith will say when he knows I’ve been in such trouble,” I replied.
“Ah, he won’t like it! But I suppose you ain’t going to tell him?”
“Yes,” I said, “I shall tell him.”
Ike remained silent for a few minutes, and sat slowly filling his pipe.
At last, as we rose to go, after Ike had paid the waitress, he said to me slowly:
“Sometimes doing right ain’t pleasant and doing wrong is. It’s quite right to go and tell Old Brownsmith and get blowed up, and it would be quite wrong not to tell him, but much the nystest. Howsoever, you tell him as soon as we get back. He can’t kill yer for that, and I don’t s’pose he’ll knock yer down with the kitchen poker and then kick you out. You’ve got to risk it.”
I did tell Old Brownsmith all my trouble when we reached home, and he listened attentively and nodding his head sometimes. Then he said softly, “Ah!” and that was all.
But I heard him scold Master Shock tremendously for going off from his work without leave.
Shock had been looking on from a distance while I was telling Old Brownsmith, and this put it into his head, I suppose, that I had been speaking against him, for during the next month he turned his back whenever he met me, and every now and then, if I looked up suddenly, it was to see him shaking his fist at me, while his hair seemed to stand up more fiercely than ever out of his crownless straw hat like young rhubarb thrusting up the lid from the forcing-pot put on to draw the stalks.