The pleasures that Pelham devised for himself were scoffed at. The imaginative reliving of knightly days or frontier activities was as distasteful to Paul's matter-of-fact mind as the embroidering at Grandmother Barbour's. The boy's collecting craze found no response in the parent; when the haphazard interest in tobacco tags, street-car transfers and marbles gave way to a real absorption in stamps, that consumed the son's spare money and time voraciously, Paul issued a ukase on the subject. "Get rid of them. Collect money, as I do, if you want to collect anything." Pelham rehashed his arguments. "They teach you geography, and history...." "They're trash; cancelled stamps, worth nothing." "People pay lots for some stamps." "You've got something else to think about. Sell 'em, or give 'em away; get rid of 'em. You understand?" Pelham finally sold them to a local barber, from whom he had bought many of the unused South American specimens. "Sure, I buy 'em," Mr. Lang smiled. He went through the scanty pages, repeating all his stock jokes: "You're a guy, and a pair of guys," as Uruguay and Paraguay were reached, being his favorite. "They're not worth much to me. Tell you what, I give you thirty-two dollars." The boy had to be content with this. Less than a year later, he surreptitiously bought back the collection for forty, keeping them concealed in a corner of the attic. The third summer brought weekly target practice upon the mountain. This grew out of a lynching at nearby Coaldale, following a brutal assault upon a white miner's wife by a negro. The Judson arsenal contained three rifles, several shot guns, and half a dozen revolvers; they were all put into use in the hollow behind Crenshaw Hill. The girls of course took part, and Mary, a good shot, thereafter carried her pistol in her handbag whenever she went to the foot of the hill. An exaggerated account of this spread among the negroes; only the boldest vagrant would think a second time of daring the unerring gunfire of the Judsons. This constant reminder of the danger to women, from men, drove the boy's mind to consider this problem. Pelham had matured slowly; his mother had been his chief sweetheart, as long as he could remember. But the association with girls at the new Highlands High School made the matter more personal to him. With eager avidity he took to whatever reading he could find upon the subject. There were pages in his presentation Bible, and in an old "Lives of the Popes," that were creased and yellowed from his frequent reading.