ILLUSTRATIONS
| Facing Page | |
| The butcher looked down at the funny face and saw the kindly motive under the exaggerated bluffness | [Frontispiece] |
| "Some of the men stood about; behind them two men sat on their horses, their elbows strapped to their bodies" | [32] |
| "I went to leeward and there found me bould Tad launchin' the little dingy" | [64] |
| The black scout jumps on Bill's back and digs his heels in his side | [120] |
| "'Tis the devil-fish!" screamed Bobby | [140] |
| "But before he could lite on her with his knife, I hopped out of my close-pen into the cañon" | [204] |
| He woke and gave a low cry. Some one was sitting on his bed | [224] |
| "For a second it left off rainin' sand, and there was a typhoon of mud and spray" | [272] |
I.—The Great Big Man[A]
By Owen Johnson
THE noon bell was about to ring, the one glorious spring note of that inexorable "Gym" bell that ruled the school with its iron tongue. For at noon, on the first liberating stroke, the long winter term died and the Easter vacation became a fact.
Inside Memorial Hall the impatient classes stirred nervously, counting off the minutes, sitting gingerly on the seat-edges for fear of wrinkling the carefully pressed suits or shifting solicitously the sharpened trousers in peril of a bagging at the knees. Heavens! how interminable the hour was, sitting there in a planked shirt and a fashion-high collar—and what a recitation! Would Easter ever begin, that long-coveted vacation when the growing boy, according to theory, goes home to rest from the fatiguing draining of his brain, but in reality returns exhausted by dinners, dances, and theaters, with perhaps a little touch of the measles to exchange with his neighbors. Even the masters droned through the perfunctory exercises, flunking the boys by twos and threes, by groups, by long rows, but without malice or emotion.