"I'm pretty well,"--

Johnny may have meant that, despite the novelty and the strangeness of
his situation, he was very well, indeed; feeling, doubtless, that he was
finally where he had a right to be and that his alert face was turned
the proper way.

The boys about Raymond were asking him to take part in a football game.
It was not that Raymond was especially popular; but he could run. In
that simple day football was football--principally a matter of running
and of straightforward kicking; and Raymond could do both better than
any other boy in the school. He could also outjump any of us--when he
would take the trouble to try. In fact, his physical faculties were in
his legs; his arms were nowhere. He was never able to throw either far
or straight. Some of his early attempts at throwing were met with
shouts of ridicule, and he never tried the thing further. If he fell
upon the ill luck of finding a ball in his hands, he would toss it to
somebody else with an air of facetious negligence. To stand, as Johnny
McComas could stand, and throw a ball straight up for seventy-five feet
and then catch it without stirring a foot from the spot where he was
planted, would have been an utter impossibility for him. In fact,
Raymond simply cultivated his obviously natural gifts; he never exerted
himself systematically to make good any of his deficiencies. He was so
as a boy; and he remained so always.

In those early days we had no special playgrounds. We commonly used the
streets. There was little traffic. Pedestrians took their chances on the
sidewalks with leapfrog and the like, and we took ours, in turn, in the
wide roadway with "pom-pom-peel-away" and similar games. Football,
however, would take us to a vacant corner lot, some two streets away.
Some absentee owner in the East was doubtless paying taxes on it with
hopes of finally recouping himself through the unearned increment.
Meanwhile it ran somewhat to rubbish and tin cans, to bare spots from
which adjoining homemakers had removed irregular squares of turf, and to
holes in the dry, brown earth where potatoes had been baked with a
minimum of success and a maximum of wood ashes and acrid smoke. It was
on the way to this frequented tract that Raymond carelessly let fall a
word about Johnny McComas. Perhaps he need not have said that Johnny had
lately been living above his father's stable--but he spoke without
special animus. A few of the boys thought Johnny's intrusion odd, e