In all their hours of close communion neither boy mentioned to the other the name of the little girl in the red shawl and the paint-brush pig-tails whose fitful fancy had brought on all his trouble. In some mysterious way each managed to shower her with picture cards, to compass her about with oranges, to embower her desk with flowers; but it was all done in stealth, and she who was the object of this devotion rewarded it openly and—alas for the vanity of her sex—impartially. All the school watched the battle of the hearts eagerly. The big boys, who usually know as little about the social transactions beneath them as the teacher knows, felt an inkling of the situation. The red-headed Pratt girl became deeply interested in the affair, though she was never invited to a party in the school's aristocracy. She did not even get an invitation to Bud Perkins's surprise party, where every one who had any social standing was expected. Yet she saw all that went on in the school, and once she all but smiled sympathetically at Piggy, when she met him slipping away from his Heart's Desire's desk, in which he had left a flock of Cupids nestling on a perfumed blotter, and a candy sheep. Mealy Jones would have snubbed the Pratt girl if she had caught him thus, but Piggy gave her a wink that made her his partner. After that hour the Pratt girl became his scout. The next day she blundered. That Friday was burned into Piggy Pennington's memory with a glowing brand.
The trouble occurred in this way: On the Friday following Piggy's black Monday, the King of Boyville, decided to resort to an heroic measure. In his meditative moments Piggy had made up speeches addressed to his Heart's Desire wherein he had proposed reconciliation at any sacrifice save that of honor. Twice during those four days he had stood by his Heart's Desire during recess, while they had looked out at the play-ground. But the words next to his heart had sputtered and bubbled into nothing on his lips. He could only snap chalk at the young gentlemen in the yard below him, in a preoccupied way, and listen to his Heart's Desire rattle on about the whims of her fractions and the caprices of her spelling-lesson. Friday noon, Winfield Hancock Pennington took a header into the Rubicon. In the deserted school-room, just after the other youngsters had gone to dinner or to play, Piggy, with much wiggling of his toes, with much hard breathing, and with many facial contortions, wrote a note. He gave it to the Pratt girl to deliver. When the first bell was ringing that noon, Piggy was piling up the primary urchins in wiggling, squealing piles at "crack the whip." During the fifteen minutes that followed, he was charging up and down the yard, howling like a Comanche, at "pull-away." But run as he would, yell as he would, and wrestle as he would, Piggy could not escape the picture that rose in his mind of a boy wearing his features and using his body, writing the note that he had written. When dismembered words and phrases from that note came to his mind on the play-ground, the quaver of terror that rose in Piggy's whoop was not dissembled. Sometimes fear froze his vitals, then a flush of self-abasement burned him with its flames. And all the time he knew that the Pratt girl had that note. He almost hoped that an earthquake would swallow her with it before she could deliver it. When Piggy came straggling in, hot, sweaty, and puffing, just as the teacher was tapping the tardy-bell, a wave of peace swept over him. His Heart's Desire was not at her desk. He knew that he had still a few moments' reprieve.
They were singing when his Heart's Desire came in. Piggy's head was tilted back to give his voice full volume as he shouted, "All his jewels, precious jewels, His loved and His own." His eyes were half closed in an ecstasy, and he did not turn his face toward the paint-brush pig-tails, nor give any sign that he knew of their owner's presence. Yet when she passed his desk, his voice did not quaver, nor his eyes blink, nor his countenance redden, as his foot darted out for her to trip over. She tripped purposely, thereby accepting affection's tribute, and he was glad.
To elaborate the tale of how the Pratt girl blundered with Piggy Pennington's note would be depressing. For it holds in its barbed meshes a record of one agonizing second in which Piggy saw the folded paper begin to slip and slide down the incline of his Heart's Desire's desk, whereon the Pratt girl had dropped it; saw the two girls grab for it; heard it crash from the seat to the floor with what seemed to him a deafening roar. Nor is this all that the harrowing tale might disclose. It might dilate upon the horror that wrenched Piggy's spine as he watched the teacher's finger crook a signal for the note to be brought forward. It would be manifestly cruel and clearly unnecessary to describe the forces which impelled the psychic wave of suggestion that inundated the school—even to the youth of the "B" class, with his head under the desk, looking for a pencil—and gave every demon there gleeful knowledge that the teacher had nabbed a note and would probably read it aloud. It is enough to submit the plain, but painful, statement that, when the teacher tapped her pencil for attention, a red ear, a throbbing red ear, flared out from either side of Piggy Pennington's Fourth Reader, while not far away a pair of pig-tails bristled up with rage and humiliation from a desk where a little girl's head lay buried in her arms. Then the teacher unfolded the crackling paper and read this note:—