“Jane Morton’s got a beau
And I know what’ll please her,
A bottle of wine—”
but she got no further. Chicken Little, too, had caught sight of her brother Ernest and Carol, and she flew at Katy like a young fury.
The remainder of the doggerel was largely drowned in the scuffle that ensued, but Katy managed to get “Johnny Carter” out in a shrill treble that carried far, in spite of the hands clapped over her mouth.
The boys heard it, grinned, and passed on. Chicken Little was furious.
“I’ll never forgive you, Katy Halford, as long as I live, so there!” And she turned her back on the offending Katy, stalked straight out of the yard and banged the gate after her emphatically.
The feud lasted a week. Chicken Little passed Katy by as if she did not exist, and Katy lost no opportunity to hector her. She chanted Johnny’s name every time Jane came in sight till the child loathed the sound. To add to her woes, Grace Dart began to demand some visible proof that Johnny was her beau.
“He hasn’t ever given you anything, has he?” she quizzed. “He gave Sallie a big red apple yesterday at recess—I saw him.”
Chicken Little grew desperate. She didn’t care very much to have Johnny or anybody else as a beau. She wished there were no such things as beaux on the face of the earth, but her pride was stung to the quick. She began to imagine that Johnny grinned when he saw her. Suppose he had heard. She wanted to run every time she saw him coming, but she felt that she must do something to make friends with him.
Finally she thought out a way. She saw some of the older girls buying candy hearts at the grocery store one Saturday when she went downtown on an errand for her mother. That would be just the thing she thought. If she could find one with a nice motto it surely wouldn’t be very hard to turn around and lay it on Johnny’s desk.
The more she thought about it, the more feasible the plan seemed. Sunday afternoon she went upstairs and shook a nickel out of her bank which she invested in candy hearts the next morning, going downtown on her way to school—a thing strictly forbidden in the Morton household.