"You have to ask Mama," she said, as our little figures dropped their shadows across Mrs. Lane's kitchen floor.
This was more than I had bargained for. I was beginning to discover that Miss Jean was a young woman of action as well as decision. But I was game.
"Mrs. Lane," I said, bracing my chubby legs for the ordeal, "I-want-to-marry-Jean."
Jean's mother looked at me with a smile that broadened until it broke into open laughter.
"I am afraid you are very precocious children," she remarked. I didn't know what that meant, but she gave us each a doughnut, and we went away happy, Jean twirling hers on her finger for a wedding ring.
CHAPTER II.
That same summer I began going to school. Perhaps I should say that John Lane and I began going to school, as it was something of a joint adventure. We talked of it together for weeks before the great event. At that time my objective in life, in so far as I had one, was to be a locomotive engineer, but John had elected to be the owner of a woolen mill—blandly overlooking the little question of capital—and we discussed our school training in the light of these ambitions.
On the eventful morning I remember my father coming into the loft and leaning over my bed, where I feigned sleep. "Puir wee mannie," I heard him say, dropping into the Scotch tongue which he reserved for moments of emotion, "it's a long road he's starting on, and a hard one, too, or he'll no be like the rest o' us." My mother scoured me well and dressed me in a clean new suit and took my cheeks between her hands and kissed me, and told me to work hard and grow up a good man like my father. At the gate I met John, and together we started down the turnpike of life.
I spent the day becoming accustomed to my new environment, and marvelling over a certain bald spot on the teacher's head which shone resplendent when the light struck it a certain way, and wondering what possible advantage it could be to a locomotive engineer to know that A had two slanting legs tied together in the middle. But nothing of importance happened until after school was dismissed, when suddenly I found myself surrounded by a group of boys a little older than myself. A carroty-headed little gamin about my size came dancing out in front of me, flinging his arms about and demanding, "Kin you fight?"
I was much too guileless to realize that this was an undersized boy, nine or ten years old, a bully who maintained his position by picking fights with children about his own size, but much his inferior in strength and hardihood. Now I had never been in a fight in my life, unless dragging Marjorie home once or twice when she was obstreperous could be so described. I don't know what made me answer as I did; probably it was the immeasurable insolence on his little, twisted face, but I shouted, "You bet! I can knock your head off!"