“Amy, I want to go away to school and study. I want to be a great author and the only way I can be one is to go to school!”
“Do you really want to go away to school and study, Jimmy?”
“You know I do, sis, oh, you know I do. I must! I just have to, Amy. Try and fix it with Mom and Dad. Please!”
“Then I shall talk to Mother and Dad and see if they won’t consent to letting you go back to Owosso with me.”
Amy lost no time in beginning her work of persuasion on Mr. and Mrs. Curwood. They objected very much when the proposition was first mentioned and Amy worked feverishly to wear them down. Apparently they wanted to keep their youngest child with them and had no intentions of letting him go all the way back to the old home town of Owosso unless they, too, went along.
Amy spent many long hours pleading with her parents to let her brother go back with her, until the last thread of resistance had been worn away and she had won her first battle for her brother. If she had only known at the time the battles she was to have to wage for him in the future!
When Amy told Jim the good news he fairly raised the roof of the farmhouse with his jubilant howls of happiness. He vowed to his parents in his own childlike manner that some day they would be very proud of him.
As the days passed by and the time neared when Jim Curwood would once again leave the little farm, he would notice tears in his mother’s eyes occasionally, despite the fact that she tried not to show them. His father became much more thoughtful, and Jack, Jim’s faithful dog who always went with Skinny and himself on their hikes through the country side, followed the boy around in an extremely strange manner. He seemed to sense in his keen, canine way that his young master was going to leave him. Little did Jim realize that the day he bade farewell to his family and to his dog Jack it would be the last he would ever see either the dog or the farm itself.
It was exactly a month to the day after the boy had gone to Owosso that the good animal died.
Never before in all of his young life had Jim Curwood hated to leave his loved ones, despite the fact that he was determined to leave. His mother cried out as her little son climbed aboard the old buckboard with his sister: