The next morning he was greeted on the play-ground by shouts of "Spell it backward!" He could not guess what was meant, and was still more puzzled as they continued to call him "Double—back—action," "Reversible-engine," and other bits of school-boy wit. He begged them to tell him, and at last some one suggested, in a tone of great disgust, "Spell your name backward, booby, and then you'll see."
He did, and he saw: Keens—backward.
But he was not yet ready to cultivate straightforward spelling. That club still bothered him; he could not give up his strong desire to find out its secrets. By dint of much listening and spying he gathered that it was to meet one night in a barn belonging to the father of one of the boys, and he made up his mind to be there. He crept near the door as darkness closed in, and listened intently. They were inside surely, for he could hear something moving about; but he wanted to hear more than that, so he ventured to raise the wooden latch. It made no noise; he cautiously opened the door a trifle, and peeped in. It was dark and quiet, so he opened it wider. It gave a loud grating creak; a scurry of quick footsteps sounded on the floor, and then a white thing suddenly rose before him, tall and ghostly. In an agony of fright and horror, he turned to run, but the thing with one fearful blow struck him down, trampled heavily over him, and sped away with a loud "Ba-ha-ha-ha-a-a!"
As Peter limped home, muddy, battered, and bruised, he wondered if any of the boys knew that Farmer Whippletree's wretched old billy-goat was in the barn that night.
They did.
"How did you leave William, Peter?" he was asked at least twenty times in the course of the next day. In the grammar class a boy who was called on for a sentence wrote, "A villain is more worthy of respect than a sneak."
"Oh no, not quite that," remarked the teacher, "but—neither can be a gentleman."
On a morning in early July he received as usual the family mail from the carrier at the door, and carried it to his mother, examining it as he went. A postal card excited his curiosity; it was, he knew, from his aunt, in whose company he was to go to the mountains, and he was anxious to know what she said. But one of his friends was waiting for him to go and catch crabs and minnows for an aquarium, and as the morning hours are the best for such work, they were in a hurry. So he slipped it into his pocket to read as he went along, intending to place it where it might be found on the hall floor when he came back, that his mother might be deceived into thinking it had been accidentally dropped there.
But he forgot all about it before they had gone twenty steps. He spent the morning at the creek, and the afternoon at his friend's house, returning home in the evening. As he passed through the hall to his mother's room, the thought of it suddenly flashed on his mind. He felt in his pocket, with a sinking at his heart, but the card was gone.
Where? He could not pretend to imagine, as he thought of the roundabout ramble he had taken. He got up early the next morning, and carefully hunted over every step of the ground, but all in vain. It would have been well if he had gone at once to his mother, and confessed what he had done; but he delayed, still cherishing a hope of finding what he had lost, and the longer he waited, the more impossible it became to tell. He remembered that a boy had once said to him, "A sneak is sure to be a coward."