City Boy Read Free

carefully arranged ringlets of her hair all suggested non-squeaky loveliness. At the moment of his so deciding, it chanced that she turned her head and met his look. Her large hazel eyes widened in surprise, and at once there was no further question of candidacy. She was elected.
    It now became obligatory upon Herbert to pretend that she did not exist. He looked out of the window and began to make believe that an extremely exciting and unusual event was taking place in the girls' playground below—just what, he was not sure, but it called for him to clap his palm to the side of his face, shake his head from side to side, and exclaim very loudly, “Gee whiz! Gosh! Never saw anything like
that
!” (By this time the imaginary sight had started to take shape as a teacher lying in a pool of blood, her head split open, after a jump from the roof.) He was compelled to run, first down the side aisle of the auditorium to look out of the other windows, and then up the aisle again and through the leather door at the rear, feigning amazement at the discovery of the girl on the stairs. She was seated busily reading a geography book upside down, having snatched it after watching all his pantomime up to the point when she saw he intended to come through the door.
    After enacting an intensity of surprise at the sight of the girl that would have sufficed had he come upon a unicorn, Herbert recovered himself and said sternly, “What are you doing here?”
    “Who wants to know?” said the girl, putting aside the book.
    “Me, that's who.”
    “Who's me?”
    “Me is me,” said Herbert, pointing to his three-starred yellow armband.
    “Huh! Garbage gang,” said the girl. Turning her back on him, she drew an apple out of a gleaming new tin lunch box and began to eat it with exaggerated nonchalance, her eyebrows raised and her gaze directed out at the smiling day.
    “Maybe you'd like to come down to Mr. Gauss's office with me,” said Herbie fiercely.
    Mr. Julius Gauss was the principal, a heavy, round-headed gentleman seen by the children only at special assemblies, where he read psalms in a gloomy singsong and gave endless speeches which nobody understood, but which seemed in favor of George Washington, America, and certain disgusting behavior found only in mollycoddles. He was regarded by the children as the most frightful thing outside the storybooks, a view which the teachers encouraged and which several of them seemed to share.
    “And stop eating,” added Herbie, “when you're talking to a head monitor.”
    Red Locks quailed and put down the apple, but she tried to brave it out. “You can't make me go down there,” she said. (It was always “down” to Mr. Gauss's office, possibly because of the general analogy to infernal regions.)
    “Can't I?” said Herbert. “Can't I? It so happens that as
captain
of the Social Service Squad I have to see Mr. Gauss every Thursday, which is today, and make my report to him. And anyone who I tell to come with me has to come. But you can
try
not coming—oh, sure, you can
try.
I don't think you would try it more than
once,
but you can
try.
”
    The contents of this speech, excepting Herbert's rank, were a lie. But Herbert had not learned yet to draw the line between the facts devised by his powerful imagination and the less vivid facts existing in nature, and while he spoke he fully believed what he was saying.
    “Anyway,” said the girl, “he wouldn't do anything to me even if you did bring me down there, because I'm going to his camp this summer.”
    “His camp?” Herbie made the mistake of lapsing from his positive tone.
    “Yes, his camp, smartie,” sneered the girl. “I thought you knew everything. Camp Manitou, in the Berkshires. You just try bringing one of his campers down to him. He'll just demote you off your old garbage gang.”
    “He will not.”
    “He will so.”
    “He will not,” said Herbie, “because I'm going to his old camp myself.”
    This was somewhat too