Della thus
proving poor material for his new manner to work upon, he approached
Duke, in the backyard, and, bending double, seized the lowly animal by
the forepaws.
"I let you know my name's Penrod Schofield," hissed the boy. He
protruded his underlip ferociously, scowled, and thrust forward his head
until his nose touched the dog's. "And you better look out when Penrod
Schofield's around, or you'll get in big trouble! YOU UNDERSTAN' THAT,
'BO?"
The next day, and the next, the increasing change in Penrod puzzled and
distressed his family, who had no idea of its source.
How might they guess that hero-worship takes such forms? They were
vaguely conscious that a rather shabby boy, not of the neighbourhood,
came to "play" with Penrod several times; but they failed to connect
this circumstance with the peculiar behaviour of the son of the house,
whose ideals (his father remarked) seemed to have suddenly become
identical with those of Gyp the Blood.
Meanwhile, for Penrod himself, "life had taken on new meaning, new
richness." He had become a fighting man--in conversation at least. "Do
you want to know how I do when they try to slip up on me from behind?"
he asked Della. And he enacted for her unappreciative eye a scene of
fistic manoeuvres wherein he held an imaginary antagonist helpless in a
net of stratagems.
Frequently, when he was alone, he would outwit, and pummel this same
enemy, and, after a cunning feint, land a dolorous stroke full upon a
face of air.
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