r then an appellation. No one ever dreamed of
addressing him by that misnomer, unless you except his school teachers.
Once or twice the boys had tried to use his name as a weapon, shrieking
in a shrill falsetto and making two syllables of it. He put a stop to
that soon enough with fists and feet. His virility could have triumphed
over a name twice as puerile. For that matter, I once knew a young husky
named Fayette who--but that's another story.

The Scaritts lived the other side of the tracks. If you know Chippewa,
or its equivalent, you get the significance of that. Nobodys. Not only
did they live the other side of the tracks; they lived so close to them
that the rush and rumble of the passing trains shook the two-story frame
cottage and rattled the crockery on the pantry shelves. The first
intelligible sound the boy made was a chesty chug-chug-chug in imitation
of a panting engine tugging its freight load up the incline toward the
Junction. When Chug ran away--which was on an average of twice daily--he
was invariably to be found at the switchman's shanty or roaming about
the freight yards. It got so that Stumpy Gans, the one-legged switchman,
would hoist a signal to let Mrs. Scaritt know that Chug was safe.

He took his first mechanical toy apart, piece by piece. "Wait till your
pa comes home!" his mother had said, with terrible significance. Chug,
deep in the toy's wreckage, seemed undismayed, so Mrs. Scaritt gave him
a light promissory slap and went on about her housework. That night,
before supper, Len Scaritt addressed his son with a sternness quite at
variance with his easy-going nature.

"Come here to me! Now, then, what's this about your smashing up good
toys? Huh? Whatdya mean! Christmas not two days back and here you go
smashing--"

The culprit trotted over to a corner and returned with the red-painted
tin thing in his hand. It was as good as new. There may even have been
some barely noticeable improvement in its locomotive powers. Chug had
merely taken it apart in order to put it together again, and he had been
too absorbed to pause long enough to tell his mother so. After that,
nothing that bore wheels, internally or externally, was safe from his
investigating fingers.

It was his first velocipede that really gave him his name. As he rode up
and down, his short legs working like piston-rods gone mad, pedestrians
would scatter in terror. His onrush was as relentless as that of an
engine on a track, and