With
hanging heads and despondent countenances, each still ornamented with a
moustache and an imperial, Penrod and Sam awaited sentence.
This is a boy's lot: anything he does, anything whatever, may afterward
turn out to have been a crime--he never knows.
And punishment and clemency are alike inexplicable.
Mr. Williams took his son by the ear.
"You march home!" he commanded.
Sam marched, not looking back, and his father followed the small figure
implacably.
"You goin' to whip me?" quavered Penrod, alone with Justice.
"Wash your face at that hydrant," said his father sternly.
About fifteen minutes later, Penrod, hurriedly entering the corner drug
store, two blocks distant, was astonished to perceive a familiar form at
the soda counter.
"Yay, Penrod," said Sam Williams. "Want some sody? Come on. He didn't
lick me. He didn't do anything to me at all. He gave me a quarter."
"So'd mine," said Penrod.
CHAPTER XVIII MUSIC
Boyhood is the longest time in life for a boy. The last term of the
school-year is made of decades, not of weeks, and living through them is
like waiting for the millennium. But they do pass, somehow, and at last
there came a day when Penrod was one of a group that capered out
from the gravelled yard of "Ward School, Nomber Seventh," carolling a
leave-taking of the institution, of their instructress, and not even
forgetting Mr. Capps, the janitor.
"Good-bye, teacher! Good-bye, school! Good-bye, Cappsie, dern ole fool!"
Penrod sang the loudest.
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