“You hear that, you fellows? I'd be gosh darned if I'd let her dictate to me!” said Reddy who was of a violent nature. “Does she give you anything to play with, that's what I want to know.” Stephen was forced to confess that she did not. “That's just like a woman! I wonder how she thinks you're going to play! I just wouldn't play, I'd learn her she couldn't boss me!” He seemed quite incensed at the unreasonableness of the situation, and Stephen was not free from an uneasy suspicion that he regarded him as mean spirited in consequence of his quiet acceptance of it. Then it appeared that Reddy, his name was Riley Crittendon, was the only child and despair of a widow whose straitened circumstances were sufficiently advertised by his clothes, which in no way fitted his lean active figure. Benjamin Wade explained that Reddy, like the barn, was under a ban; and that he consorted with him only at great personal risk, since his father had repeatedly threatened him with corporal chastisement if he so much as recognized his iniquitous existence. Stephen's innocent eyes grew wide at this. The same was true in the case of Spike. All that Benjamin Wade's father had promised Benjamin Wade, Spike's father had promised him, and Spike intimated that he was singularly capable of fulfilling each promise he had made; yet in spite of this, they both associated with Reddy indefatigably, but in the unostentatious manner favoured by back alleys. Reddy's career of crime seemed to have embraced a long category of evil and wrong-doing. He had once run away from home with a circus; he had twice narrowly escaped drowning, by venturing on the thin ice he had been forbidden to venture on in the early winter; his crowning achievement, however, was having been blown up in a Fourth of July celebration which he had arranged with stolen powder; but the complete list of his crimes would have filled a long summer afternoon. It was Benjamin Wade who constituted himself Reddy's historian, though he received occasional promptings from Spike, who seemed most anxious that he should overlook no act that had gone to make up the sum and substance of Reddy's iniquity; and while Benjamin Wade was thus busy, Reddy himself was seen to visibly swell with pride.