g McCarron
pounded the floor in applause. Spike merely shook his head once.

"The kid's showing speed," he admitted, cordially. "If he just had
something back of them punches!"

"It was a daisy!" exclaimed Sharon. "My suffering stars, what a daisy!"

"'Twas neatly placed!" said Pegleg.

"I'm surprised at you!" said Sharon later to the panting apprentice.
"I'm surprised and grieved! You boys mixing it here every day for weeks
and never letting on!"

"I never thought you'd like it," said Wilbur.

"Like it!" said Sharon. He said it unctuously. "And say, don't you let
on to Miss Penniman that I set here and held the watch for you. I ain't
wanting that to get out on me."

"No, sir," said Wilbur.

Later Sharon tried to avoid Winona one day on River Street, but when he
saw that she would not be avoided he met her like a man.

"I've reasoned with the boy from time to time," he confessed, gloomily,
"but he's self-headed, talking huge high about being a good lightweight
and all that. I don't know--mebbe I haven't taken just the right tack
with him yet."

Winona thought him curiously evasive in manner. She believed that he
feared the worst for the boy, but was concealing it from her.

"His eye is almost well where that cowardly bully struck him," she told
Sharon. "If only we could get him into something where he could hold his
head up."

"He does that too much now," began Sharon, impulsively, but stopped,
floundering. "I mean he ain't enough ashamed," he concluded feebly, and
feigned that someone had called him imperatively from the door of the
First National Bank.

From time to time Spike's boxing manner grew tense for a period of days.
He tightened up, as Sharon put it, and left a sore and battered
apprentice while he went off to some distant larger town to fight,
stepping nonchalantly aboard the six-fifty-eight with his fighting
trunks and shoes wrapped in a copy of the Newbern _Advance_, and
shifting his gum as he said good-bye to Wilbur, who would come down to
see him off.

Sometimes Spike returned from these sorties unscathed and with money.
Oftener he came back without money and with a face--from abrasive
thrusts--looking as if a careless golfer had gone over him and neglected
to replace the divots. After these times there were likely to follow
complicated episodes of dentistry at the office of Doctor Patten. These
would render the invincible smile of Spike more refulgent than ever.

The next birthday of