Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/206

 Pud Jones nor Redney McWilliams attended school that morning, that neither of them had gone picking strawberries, and that the willow bread-basket had been vindictively kicked round and round the little yard until it was in tatters. When he later found out that the two boys had spent the entire morning at the swimming-hole, he sniffed once more, with zest, at the advanced dissolution of the back-yard potato pile, hunched up a contemplative shoulder, gazed down at his swollen toe and wondered if after, all that meant another black mark in the big red ledger.

During those idle, empty days which intervened between berry-picking time and the midsummer holidays, when the boys of Chamboro would be turned loose on the world again. Lonely O'Malley was more and more driven in on himself. His last shred of available material had been used up for that octopus like air-ship which sucked away his time and his worldly wealth and gave nothing in return. Lionel Clarence, after his illness, was still capricious and languid; the companionship of Annie Eliza was to be resorted to only after a secretive and periodic fashion; Shivers and