“Huh!” grunted the Shark skeptically.
Poke laughed aloud. “Ho, ho, ho! I don’t beat you often, Shark, but when I do, I beat you all to pieces. Talk about mince pie, if you want to. I’ll talk about it, too, and when we get through, we’ll see who hits nearer the truth. Just you wait and see, and——”
But the Shark was moving away. For once, at least, he found it impossible to maintain argument against Poke, the unmathematical philosopher and seer of strange visions.
Sam’s good deed had brought him most embarrassing reward. Of this the Shark was quite as convinced as Poke could be, or Sam himself.
CHAPTER IV
SAM’S COUNSELLOR
Sam took the matter of Mrs. Grant’s gratitude and the promised pie much to heart. He was, as it happened, a sensitive fellow, and he was of the age at which dread of ridicule is perhaps keenest. So he readily imagined that the whole school was laughing at him and the picture he must have presented with Mrs. Grant’s stout arm about his shoulders; and made himself miserable by suspicion of amusement in every glance he caught and of personal application in every laugh he heard.
He had been reasonably satisfied with the manner in which he had stopped the runaway, and might not have objected to a certain amount of publicity, provided it could have come in the right way. If some man, who had been a witness of the affair, should have met him on the street, and clapped him on the shoulder, and growled “Clever job you did, youngster!” or “Good work, son!”—why, that would have been all right, and quite in accord with his idea of the proprieties. But to be hugged and patted, and promised a pie, with his club-mates and others looking on, to say nothing of the principal—truly, Sam felt that his was a hard and undeserved fate.
His behavior was somewhat like that of most stricken creatures; that is, he sought solitude. He shunned the club. From school he went straight home, and there, curled up in a corner of the library, read or studied industriously. Even to his father and mother he said little, and to neither did he confide a syllable of his unhappy experience. This sort of thing went on for two or three days, with the natural result that by much brooding upon his troubles he magnified them out of all proportion, and made himself so genuinely miserable that, at last, he was driven in desperation to seek diversion. He tried to find it at the club, and again his luck was bad.
Trojan Walker had the gift of mimicry, and Herman Boyd liked to devise little dramatic scenes. Sam walked in upon the assembled club, just in time to behold the Trojan, with a shawl wrapped about him to increase his resemblance to Mrs. Grant, presenting a lump of dough on a toy pie-plate to Herman, to the extreme delectation of the spectators. Step and Poke were roaring with laughter, and even the solemn Shark was chuckling.
“Heroic youth, accept this slight trifle as a testimonial of my deep and undying gratitude and affection,” the Trojan was reciting. “You risked your life to save me, and now you can risk it again. This is no common pie. It’s a—a—a——”