Billy also undertook to do his share. A generous sum of money had been offered to the best student in the graduating class of the grammar school; and he decided to try for it. And when Billy made up his mind to anything connected with books, it was as good as done. For if he had to study a little harder than some, his perseverance, added to an unusual facility in telling what he knew, helped him to success.
Mrs. Bennett wished May Nell to be in the open air as much as possible; and this meant a new experience for Billy, which he accepted with tolerable grace.
“A girl under foot all the time,” Shifty complained. He had no sister.
“Well, you know the other thing to do if you don’t like it,” Billy retorted, bluntly. “She’s my sister till her folks are found, and that isn’t likely.”
“But if your steamer works you don’t want its secrets peddled round; and girls always blab.”
“You’re the only girl I’m afraid of in that line. Isn’t that so, Pretty?”
“You bet!” Pretty endorsed, inelegantly.
This conversation took place in Billy’s shop, a room adjoining the wood-house and given over to his use. Nothing short of the world in the second verse of Genesis was equal to the chaos of that place. Every conceivable scrap and job lot of “truck” was there in a jumbled heap; and Billy was never happier than when mussing it over in search of “material”; in greasy overalls and crownless hat, whistling merrily, bringing forth to substance and form the inventions of his busy brain.
The blandishments of soda water fountains, candy stores, and other boyish temptations, found no victim in Billy. But if Mr. Cooper, the tinshop man, had driven hard bargains he would have bankrupted the boy. As it was his weekly allowance suffered in spite of Mr. Cooper’s generosity and Billy’s free access to a rich scrap heap at the rear of the big shop where everything, one would say, in tin and iron was made, from well pipe, tanks, and boilers, to tin wings for Edith’s fairies in the opera.
Now a steamboat was on hand. At odd times for weeks, Billy, Harold, and one or two other boys, under secrecy of lock and key, had been slowly bringing to completion a wonderful structure.