“Well, he isn’t having much of a good time. The other fellows plague him. But I don’t see that’s it’s any of my business, now; do you?”
“I’m afraid—” began Tiny, and then stopped short.
“Out with it!” said Johnny, impatiently, “you’re afraid—what?”
“I’m afraid that’s what the priest and the Levite said,” finished Tiny, slowly.
“What do you?—oh yes, I suppose you mean about the Good Samaritan, and, ‘now which of these was neighbor?’ Is that what you’re driving at?”
Tiny nodded again, even more earnestly than before.
“Now that’s very queer,” said Johnny, musingly, “but Jim said almost exactly the same thing. He’s picked up a little lame fellow—no relation to him at all, and no more his concern than anybody’s else—and he’s keeping the boys off him, and behaving as if he was the little chap’s grandmother, and I do believe it is all because of things mamma has said to him. He doesn’t know about Ned Owen; what he said was because I happened to catch him grandmothering this little Taffy, as he calls him, but it was just exactly as if he had known all about everything. It’s very well for him; he isn’t all mixed up with the other bootblacks, the way I am with the boys at school, and he can do as he pleases, but don’t you see, Tiny, what a mess I should get myself into, right away, if I began to take up for that boy against all the others?”
Tiny replied with what Johnny considered needless emphasis,—