CHAPTER VI THE ODD STICK I My mother’s savings were exhausted in the spring of 1900. The payments on her pension were delayed. The good woman was almost alone in the world with a seam-ripping, button-bursting, small boy who demanded to be clothed, fed, educated. Rather than submit to the slavery of keeping house for some widowed farmer, she decided to move to Paris also and try to find work in a store. Thus I ultimately rejoined Nathan. He did not greet me as effusively as I had expected. His indifference hurt. But I soon made allowance. Nathan was in love. The object of his affections was Bernie Gridley. “Come over to my house and tell me all about her,” I invited that first noontime. “After school? I can’t. I work.” “You work! Where?” “I peddle papers every night—_Telegraphs_.” “You mean you make real money? Gee, that’s swell.” Nat shut his lips. “Aw, I don’t get nothin’. Pa makes me do it. He takes it and uses it to help out at home.” “But you do the work and so the money belongs to you!” “Yeah! But pa figgers he’s supportin’ me and he had to work when he was a boy—and turn over the money to his father. So he makes me do the same.” “I’d like to see _my_self——” “Aw, you’re talkin’ through your hat! Whatter you know about havin’ a father? Your father died! Hang it all, some guys have all the luck!” II Nathan was “goin’ on fourteen” now. He had grown older, somehow, older than the twenty months which had intervened since I had last seen him warranted. These three—Nathan, the Dresden Doll and a shocky-headed young troglodyte who had just arrived from the wilds of Foxboro Center—were seated near one another during that year in the seventh grade of the old Academy on the hill. The American public school being the great common denominator for juvenile humanity, it had developed after several months’ scholastic propinquity between Nathan and Bernie that he was not quite so impossible as the Dresden Doll had at first assumed. And Bernie’s teachers had rather caustic ideas about the Gridley “blood.” The Dresden Doll became a little more human. “What are you going to give me for my birthday, boy?” she demanded of Nathan one day, accosting him on the edge of the school yard. “I’m going to have a party, you know. Everybody’s coming and must bring me something.” The abruptness of meeting and question left Nathan speechless. With his temperament and home training—or lack of it—it was only natural he should have been awkward in her presence. But he finally rallied. “Well, I’ll try to give you something bigger ’n better than you’ll get from anybody else. You can bet on that!” His declaration implied a promise. Moreover, after the nature of such youthful indiscretions, it grew plain he would have to make that promise good or be forever discredited and go through the rest of life a celibant.