t the desk to see
them Duluth folks off? Pap's not going to be pleased with you."

"I don't want any breakfast," muttered Dickie.

Amelia laughed. "No. I'll be bound you don't. Tongue like a kitten and a
head like a cracked stove!"

She slapped down some clean sheets on a shelf and creaked toward the
hall, but stopped at the open door. Sylvester Hudson was coming down the
passage and she was in no mind to miss the "bawling-out" of Dickie which
this visit must portend. She shut the linen-room door softly, therefore,
and controlled her breathing.

But Dickie knew that she was there and, when his father rapped, he knew
why she was there.

He tumbled wretchedly from his bed, swore at his injured ankle, hopped to
the door, unlocked it, and hopped back with panic swiftness before his
father's entrance. He sat in his crumpled pajamas amidst his crumpled,
dingy bedclothes, his hair scattered over his forehead, his large, heavy
eyes fixed anxiously upon Sylvester.

"Say, Poppa--" he began.

Then "Pap's" voice cracked out at him.

"You hold your tongue," snapped Sylvester, "or you'll get what's comin'
to you!" He jerked Dickie's single chair from against the wall, threw the
clothing from it, and sat down, crossing his legs, and holding up at his
son the long finger that had frightened Sheila. Dickie blinked at it.

"You know what I was plannin' to do to you after last night? I meant to
come round here and pull you out of your covers and onto the floor
there"--he pointed to a spot on the boards to which Dickie fearfully
directed his own eyes--"and kick the stuffin' out of you." Dickie
contemplated the long, pointed russet shoes of his parent and shuddered
visibly. Nevertheless in the slow look he lifted from the boot to his
father's face, there was a faint gleam of irony.

"What made you change your mind?" he asked impersonally.

It was this curious detachment of Dickie's, this imperturbability, that
most infuriated Hudson. He flushed.

"Just a little sass from you will bring me back to the idea," he
said sharply.

Dickie lowered his eyes.

"What made me change was--Miss Arundel's kindness. She came and begged
you off. She said you hadn't done anything or said anything to frighten
her, that you'd been"--Sylvester drawled out the two words in the
sing-song of Western mockery--"'sweet and love-ly.'"

Dickie's face was pink. He began to tie a knot in the corner of one of
his thin gray sheet-blankets.

"I don't kn