etting bitten, and you must take good
care of it, Penrod."

"Yes'm."

Penrod lingered helplessly outside the doorway, looking at Sam, who
stood partially obscured in the hall, behind Mrs. Williams. Penrod's
eyes, with a veiled anguish, conveyed a pleading for help as well as a
horror of the position in which he found himself. Sam, however, pale and
determined, seemed to have assumed a stony attitude of detachment, as if
it were well understood between them that his own comparative innocence
was established, and that whatever catastrophe ensued, Penrod had
brought it on and must bear the brunt of it alone.

"Well, you'd better run along, since they're waiting for you at home,"
said Mrs. Williams, closing the door. "Good-night, Penrod."

. . . Ten minutes later Penrod took his place at his own dinner-table,
somewhat breathless but with an expression of perfect composure.

"Can't you _ever_ come home without being telephoned for?" demanded his
father.

"Yes, sir." And Penrod added reproachfully, placing the blame upon
members of Mr. Schofield's own class, "Sam's mother and father kept me,
or I'd been home long ago. They would keep on talkin', and I guess I had
to be _polite_, didn't I?"

His left arm was as free as his right; there was no dreadful bulk
beneath his jacket, and at Penrod's age the future is too far away to be
worried about. The difference between temporary security and permanent
security is left for grown people. To Penrod, security was security, and
before his dinner was half eaten his spirit had become fairly serene.

Nevertheless, when he entered the empty carriage-house of the stable, on
his return from school the next afternoon, his expression was not
altogether without apprehension, and he stood in the doorway looking
well about him before he lifted a loosened plank in the flooring and
took from beneath it the grand old weapon of the Williams family. Nor
did his eye lighten with any pleasurable excitement as he sat himself
down in a shadowy corner and began some sketchy experiments with the
mechanism. The allure of first sight was gone. In Mr. Williams'
bed-chamber, with Sam clamoring for possession, it had seemed to Penrod
that nothing in the world was so desirable as to have that revolver in
his own hands--it was his dream come true. But, for reasons not
definitely known to him, the charm had departed; he turned the cylinder
gingerly, almost with distaste; and slowly there stole over him a