ing continuously, presently walked to the alley
door, and remarked in a weak voice, "I'm sick at my stummick." He
paused, then added more decidedly: "I'm goin' home. I guess I've stood
about enough around here for one day!" And bestowing a last glance upon
his friend, who was now sitting dumbly upon the floor in the exact spot
where he had stood to fire the dreadful shot, Sam moved slowly away.

The early shades of autumn evening were falling when Penrod emerged from
the stable; and a better light might have disclosed to a shrewd eye some
indications that here was a boy who had been extremely, if temporarily,
ill. He went to the cistern, and, after a cautious glance round the
reassuring horizon, lifted the iron cover. Then he took from the inner
pocket of his jacket an object which he dropped listlessly into the
water: it was a bit of wood, whittled to the likeness of a pistol. And
though his lips moved not, nor any sound issued from his vocal organs,
yet were words formed. They were so deep in the person of Penrod they
came almost from the slowly convalescing profundities of his stomach.
These words concerned firearms, and they were:

"Wish I'd never seen one! Never want to see one again!"

Of course Penrod had no way of knowing that, as regards bingism in
general, several of the most distinguished old gentlemen in Europe were
at that very moment in exactly the same state of mind.

CHAPTER V. THE IN-OR-IN

Georgie Bassett was a boy set apart. Not only that; Georgie knew that he
was a boy set apart. He would think about it for ten or twenty minutes
at a time, and he could not look at himself in a mirror and remain
wholly without emotion. What that emotion was, he would have been unable
to put into words; but it helped him to understand that there was a
certain noble something about him that other boys did not possess.

Georgie's mother had been the first to discover that Georgie was a
boy set apart. In fact, Georgie did not know it until one day when he
happened to overhear his mother telling two of his aunts about it.
True, he had always understood that he was the best boy in town and
he intended to be a minister when he grew up; but he had never before
comprehended the full extent of his sanctity, and, from that fraught
moment onward, he had an almost theatrical sense of his set-apartness.

Penrod Schofield and Sam Williams and the other boys of the
neighbourhood all were conscious that there was something d