“Yes'm.”
“You sometimes make it, don't you?”
“I've been s'picioned.”
“You were turned out of church once, weren't you, for shooting up a meeting?”
“Yes,” was the indignant defense, “but I proved to 'em that I was drunk, an' they tuk me back.” The girl had to laugh.
“And yet you think dancing wrong?”
“Yes'm.”
The girl gave it up—so perfunctory and final was is reply. Indeed, he seemed to have lost interest. Twice he had looked back, and now he turned again. She saw the fulfilment of some prophecy in his face as he grunted and frowned.
“Thar comes Ham Cage,” he said. Turning, the girl saw an awkward youth stepping into the road from the same ravine whence Polly and young King had come, but she did not, as did Pleasant, see Ham shifting a revolver from his hip to an inside pocket.
“Those two boys worry the life out of me,” she said, and again Pleasant grunted. They were the two biggest boys in the school, and in running, jumping, lifting weights, shooting at marks, and even in working—in everything, indeed, except in books—they were tireless rivals. And now they were bitter contestants for the favor of Polly Sizemore—a fact that Pleasant knew better than the Mission girl.