Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/340

 This latter was unexciting as a coincidence, however. I myself had deliberately produced it.

Miss Lansdale turned from talk with the child to greet me. Her face was so little menacing that I called her "Miss Katharine" on the spot. But my business was with the child.

"Lucy," I said, as I took the wicker chair by the hammock in which they both lounged, "there is a boy at school who looks at you a great deal when you're not watching him—you catch him at it—but he never comes near you. He acts as if he were afraid of you. He is an awkward, stupid boy. If he gets up to recite about geography, or about 'a gentleman sent his servant to buy ten and five-eighths yards of fine broadcloth,' or anything of that sort, and if he happens to catch your eye at the moment, he flounders like a caught fish, stares hard at the map of North America on the wall, and sits down in disgrace. And when the other boys are chasing you and pulling off your hair ribbons, he mopes off in a corner of the school yard, though he looks as if he'd like to shoot down all the other boys in cold blood."

"He has nice hair," said my woman child.

"Oh, he has! Very well; does his name happen to be 'Horsehead' or anything like that—the name the boys call him by, you know?"

"Fatty—Fatty Budlow, if that's the one you mean. Do you know him, Uncle Maje?"

"Better than any boy in the world! Haven't I been telling you about him?"