dy wants, and it's mine, I tell you! I can blow on it, or bust it,
or kick it out in the alley and leave it there, if I want to!"

"No, you can't!"

"I can, too!"

"No, you can't. You can't PROVE you can, and unless you prove it, I got
a perf--"

Roddy stamped his foot. "I can, too!" he shrieked. "You ole durn
jackass, I can, too! I can, can, can, can--"

Penrod suddenly stopped his intermittent production of blats, and
intervened. "_I_ know how you can prove it, Roddy," he said briskly.
"There's one way anybody can always prove sumpthing belongs to them,
so that nobody'd have a right to call them what they wanted to. You can
prove it's yours, EASY!"

"How?"

"Well," said Penrod, "if you give it away."

"What you mean?" asked Roddy, frowning.

"Well, look here," Penrod began brightly. "You can't give anything away
that doesn't belong to you, can you?"

"No."

"So, then," the resourceful boy continued, "f'r instance, if you give
this ole horn to me, that'd prove it was yours, and Sam'd haf to say it
was, and he wouldn't have any right to--"

"I won't do it!" said Roddy sourly. "I don't want to give you that horn.
What I want to give you anything at all for?"

Penrod sighed, as if the task of reaching Roddy's mind with reason were
too heavy for him. "Well, if you don't want to prove it, and rather
let us have the right to call you anything we want to--well, all right,
then," he said.

"You look out what you call me!" Roddy cried, only the more incensed, in
spite of the pains Penrod was taking with him. "I don't haf to prove it.
It's MINE!"

"What kind o' proof is that?" Sam Williams demanded severely. "You GOT
to prove it and you can't do it!"

Roddy began a reply, but his agitation was so great that what he said
had not attained coherency when Penrod again intervened. He had just
remembered something important.

"Oh, _I_ know, Roddy!" he exclaimed. "If you sell it, that'd prove it
was yours almost as good as givin' it away. What'll you take for it?"

"I don't want to sell it," said Roddy sulkily.

"Yay! Yay! YAY!" shouted the taunting Sam Williams, whose every word and
sound had now become almost unbearable to Master Bitts. Sam was usually
so good-natured that the only explanation of his conduct must lie in the
fact that Roddy constitutionally got on his nerves. "He KNOWS he can't
prove it! He's a goner, and now we can begin callin' him anything we can
think of! I choose to call him one first, P