Page:Arthur Stringer-The Loom of Destiny.djvu/116

The Loom of Destiny lean-legged boy with a cigarette stub in his mouth.

Johnnie Armstrong, please," replied the new boy, almost tearfully.

But that one pair of challenging eyes—they followed him right up the walk and into the schoolhouse. There were scores of other audacious enemies who gazed critically at the patches on his knees and the hole in the toe of his boot, but in all that army of foes he knew to the marrow in his childish bones that this one particular boy was to be his one particular enemy.

Through all the long, stifling, terrible first hour of school life he furtively watched the figure of his fated opponent.

During recess the new boy hung about the hallway, homesick and miserable. He wondered what his Aunt Martha and the baby were doing. He knew what his mother was doing—she was in bed all the time, of course, and coughing away just the same as if he were there.

At the end of recess, when the bell rang, and the screaming, surging crowd of children 104