after little Lummy Risdale. He's a sort of cousin of
my mother's. He is as innocent and helpless as the babes in the wood."

"I'll take care of him," said Jack.

So he took the little fellow walking away from the school-house; Will
Riley and some of the others calling after them: "Not there, not there,
my child!"

But Columbus did not lay their taunts to heart. He was soon busy talking
to Jack about things in the country, and things in town. On their
return, Riley, crying out: "Not there, my child!" threw a snow-ball
from a distance of ten feet and struck the poor little Christopher
Columbus George Washington Lafayette so severe a blow as to throw him
off his feet. Quick as a flash, Jack charged on Riley, and sent a
snow-ball into his face. An instant later he tripped him with his foot
and rolled the big, scared fellow into the snow and washed his face
well, leaving half a snow-bank down his back.

"What makes you so savage?" whined Riley. "I didn't snow-ball you." And
Riley looked around for Pewee, who was on the other side of the
school-house, and out of sight of the scuffle.

"No, you daren't snow-ball me," said Jack, squeezing another ball and
throwing it into Riley's shirt-front with a certainty of aim that showed
that he knew how to play ball. "Take that one, too, and if you bother
Lum Risdale again, I'll make you pay for it. Take a boy of your size."
And with that he moulded yet another ball, but Riley retreated to the
other side of the school-house.

CHAPTER V

WHILING AWAY TIME

Excluded from the plays of the older fellows, Jack drew around him a
circle of small boys, who were always glad to be amused with the stories
of hunting, fishing, and frontier adventure that he had heard from old
pioneers on Wildcat Creek. Sometimes he played "tee-tah-toe, three in a
row," with the girls, using a slate and pencil in a way well known to
all school-children. And he also showed them a better kind of
"tee-tah-toe," learned on the Wildcat, and which may have been in the
first place an Indian game, as it is played with grains of Indian corn.
A piece of board is grooved with a jack-knife in the manner shown in the
diagram.

[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF TEE-TAH-TOE BOARD.]

One player has three red or yellow grains of corn, and the other an
equal number of white ones. The player who won the last game has the
"go"--that is, he first puts down a grain of corn at any place where the
lines intersect, but usually i