ose almost in contact with the nose of Penrod,
whose eyes naturally became crossed.

"Dan kills the rats. See?" hissed the fat-faced boy, maintaining the
horrible juxtaposition.

"Well, all right," said Penrod, swallowing. "I don't want 'em much."
And when the pose had been relaxed, he stared at his new friend for a
moment, almost with reverence. Then he brightened.

"Come on, Rupe!" he cried enthusiastically, as he climbed the fence.
"We'll give our dogs a little live meat--'bo!"

CHAPTER XXII THE IMITATOR

At the dinner-table, that evening, Penrod Surprised his family by
remarking, in a voice they had never heard him attempt--a law-giving
voice of intentional gruffness:

"Any man that's makin' a hunderd dollars a month is makin' good money."

"What?" asked Mr. Schofield, staring, for the previous conversation had
concerned the illness of an infant relative in Council Bluffs.

"Any man that's makin' a hunderd dollars a month is makin' good money."

"What IS he talking about!" Margaret appealed to the invisible.

"Well," said Penrod, frowning, "that's what foremen at the ladder works
get."

"How in the world do you know?" asked his mother.

"Well, I KNOW it! A hunderd dollars a month is good money, I tell you!"

"Well, what of it?" said the father, impatiently.

"Nothin'. I only said it was good money."

Mr. Schofield shook his head, dismissing the subject; and here he made
a mistake: he should have followed up his son's singular contribution
to the conversation. That would have revealed the fact that there was a
certain Rupe Collins whose father was a foreman at the ladder works. All
clues are important when a boy makes his first remark in a new key.

"'Good money'?" repeated Margaret, curiously. "What is 'good' money?"

Penrod turned upon her a stern glance. "Say, wouldn't you be just as
happy if you had SOME sense?"

"Penrod!" shouted his father. But Penrod's mother gazed with dismay at
her son: he had never before spoken like that to his sister.

Mrs. Schofield might have been more dismayed than she was, if she had
realized that it was the beginning of an epoch. After dinner, Penrod was
slightly scalded in the back as the result of telling Della, the cook,
that there was a wart on the middle finger of her right hand. Della thus
proving poor material for his new manner to work upon, he approached
Duke, in the backyard, and, bending double, seized the lowly animal by
the forepaws.

"I let y