“Hi! come out from behind that roll of paper!”
But Clarence said not a word. He puffed away at his cigarette, apparently oblivious of everything save the contentment it gave him, and as he puffed Spide's mouth worked and watered sympathetically. His secret admiration was tremendous. Here was Clarence in actual and undisturbed possession of a whole cigarette. He had to purchase his cigarettes in partnership with some other boy, and go halves on the smoking of them. It made him feel cheap and common.
“Say I got one of them coffin-tacks that ain't working?” he inquired. Clarence gazed off up the tracks, ignoring the question and the questioner. Spide's presence was balm to his soul. But as one of the office force of the Buckhom and Antioch he felt a certain lofty reserve to be incumbent upon him. Besides, he and Spide had been engaged in a recent rivalry for Susie Poppleton's affections. It is true he had achieved a brilliant success over his rival, but that a mere school-boy should have ventured to oppose him, a salaried man, had struck him as an unpardonable piece of impertinence for which there could be no excuse.
Spide, however, had taken the matter most philosophically. He had recognized that he could not hope to compete with a youth who possessed unlimited wealth, which he was willing to lay out on chewing-gum and candy, his experience being that the sex was strictly mercenary and incapable of a disinterested love. Of course he had much admired Miss Poppleton; from the crown of her small dark head, with its tightly braided “pig-tails,” down to her trim little foot he had esteemed her as wholly adorable; but, after all, his affair of the heart had been an affair of the winter only. With the coming of summer he had found more serious things to think of. He was learning to swim and to chew tobacco. The mastering of these accomplishments pretty well occupied his time.
“Say!” he repeated, “got another?”
Still Clarence blinked at the fierce sunlight which danced on the rails, and said nothing. Spide slid skilfully down from his perch, but his manner had undergone a change.
“Who throwed that snipe away, anyhow?” he asked, disdainfully. Clarence turned his eyes slowly in his direction.
“Lookee here. You fellows got to keep out of these yards, or I'll tell McClintock. First we know some of you kids will be getting run over, and then your folks will set up a lively howl. Get on out! It ain't no place for little boys!”
He put the cigarette between his lips and took a deep and tantalizing pull at it. Spide kept to his own side of the ditch that ran between the fence and the tracks.
“Huh!” with infinite scorn. “Who's a kid? You won't be happy till I come over there and lick you!”