was a pale, thin youth, with a squeaky voice. His skimmed-milk
eyes popped out over a waste of freckles which blurred his features
and literally weighted down a weak, loosely-wired jaw and kept an
astonished mouth opened for hours at a time. Piggy, on the other hand,
was a sturdy, chunky, blue-eyed boy, who had fought his way up to
glory in the school, and who had run and jumped, and tumbled and
dived, and bantered himself into the right to be King of Boyville.
Chummery between the two boys seemed impossible, yet it was one of the
things which every school expects in a certain crisis. When the affair
is reversed, the two little girls go about breathing undying
hatred for one another. But a boy begins to consume his rival with
politeness, to seek him out from all other beings on earth, to study
his tastes and cater to his humors. And so, while the comradeship
between Piggy Pennington and Mealy Jones was built on ashes, its
growth was beautiful to see.

[Illustration: _Harold Jones_]

[Illustration: _To study his tastes_.]

[Illustration: ... _the comradeship ... was beautiful to see_]

In all their hours of close communion neither boy mentioned to the
other the name of the little girl in the red shawl and the paint-brush
pig-tails whose fitful fancy had brought on all his trouble. In some
mysterious way each managed to shower her with picture cards, to
compass her about with oranges, to embower her desk with flowers;
but it was all done in stealth, and she who was the object of
this devotion rewarded it openly and--alas for the vanity of her
sex--impartially. All the school watched the battle of the hearts
eagerly. The big boys, who usually know as little about the social
transactions beneath them as the teacher knows, felt an inkling of the
situation. The red-headed Pratt girl became deeply interested in
the affair, though she was never invited to a party in the school's
aristocracy. She did not even get an invitation to Bud Perkins's
surprise party, where every one who had any social standing was
expected. Yet she saw all that went on in the school, and once she all
but smiled sympathetically at Piggy, when she met him slipping away
from his Heart's Desire's desk, in which he had left a flock of Cupids
nestling on a perfumed blotter, and a candy sheep. Mealy Jones would
have snubbed the Pratt girl if she had caught him thus, but Piggy gave
her a wink that made her his partner. After that hour the Pratt girl
becam