"Ha, ha, ha!" she said. "I have you quarely gunked!"
"Gunked!" he exclaimed, unable to see how he had been hoaxed.
"Yes," she answered. "I gunked you nicely. You thought I wanted you to court me, but I was only having you on. Ha, ha, ha!"
He burst out laughing. "I that consoles you," he said; "you're welcome to it!"
Then she ran away and would not play "I spy" or "Tig" any more.
He had not told his mother of that passage of love with Aggie Logan. It did not occur to him to tell anything to his mother. His instinct, indeed, was not to tell things to her, to conceal them from her.
VI
If anyone had said to him that he did not love his mother as much as he loved his Uncle Matthew and his Uncle William, he would have been very angry. Not love his mother more than anyone else on earth!... Only a blow could make a proper answer to such a charge. Nevertheless his mother was associated in his mind with acts of repression, with forbidding and restraint. She seemed always to be telling him not to do things. When he wanted to go to the Lough with Willie Logan to play Robinson Crusoe and his Man Friday or to light a bonfire in Teeshie McBratney's field with shavings from Galpin's mill in the pretence that he was a Red Indian preparing for a war-dance, it was his mother who said that he was not to do it. He might fall into the water and get drowned, she said, or, he might fall into the fire and get roasted to death. As if he were not capable of controlling a raft or a bonfire!...
He felt, too, that sometimes she punished him unjustly. When the Logans and he had played Buffalo Bill and the Red Indians attacking the defenceless pale-face woman, he had had a fierce argument with Willie Logan about the part of Buffalo Bill. Willie, being older, had claimed the part for himself, and, when denied the right to it, had declared that neither Aggie nor he would play in the game. Then a compromise had been arranged: Willie was allowed to play the part of Buffalo Bill and to slay the Red Indian on condition that John, before being slain, should be allowed to scalp the helpless pale-face woman. He scalped her so severely, by tugging tightly at her long hair, that she began to cry, and Willie, more conscious of the fact that he was Aggie's brother than that he was Buffalo Bill, bore down upon John and gave him his "cowardy-blow." They fought a fierce and bitter fight, and in the end, Willie went home with a bleeding nose, and John went home with a black eye.
Willie had not played the man over that affair. He went to his mother and complained of John's selfish and brutal behaviour, alleging that he had suffered terrible punishment in a chivalrous effort to protect his sister from ruffianly assault; and his mother, a thin, acidulous woman, whose voice was half snarl and half whine, carried her son's complaint to Mrs. MacDermott.