Christian charity and fixed on each the awful penalty of "staying
in" after school for an hour every day for a week. Bob grinned:

"All right, professor--it was worth it," he said, but the mountain lad
shuffled silently away.

An hour later Hale saw the boy with a swollen lip, one eye black and
the other as merry as ever--but after that there was no more trouble
for June. Bob had made his promise good and gradually she came into
the games with her fellows there-after, while Bob stood or sat aside,
encouraging but taking no part--for was he not a member of the Police
Force? Indeed he was already known far and wide as the Infant of
the Guard, and always he carried a whistle and usually, outside the
school-house, a pistol bumped his hip, while a Winchester stood in one
corner of his room and a billy dangled by his mantel-piece.

The games were new to June, and often Hale would stroll up to the
school-house to watch them--Prisoner's Base, Skipping the Rope, Antny
Over, Cracking the Whip and Lifting the Gate; and it pleased him to see
how lithe and active his little protege was and more than a match in
strength even for the boys who were near her size. June had to take the
penalty of her greenness, too, when she was "introduced to the King and
Queen" and bumped the ground between the make-believe sovereigns, or got
a cup of water in her face when she was trying to see stars through a
pipe. And the boys pinned her dress to the bench through a crack and
once she walked into school with a placard on her back which read:

"June-Bug." But she was so good-natured that she fast became a
favourite. Indeed it was noticeable to Hale as well as Bob that Cal
Heaton, the mountain boy, seemed always to get next to June in the Tugs
of War, and one morning June found an apple on her desk. She swept the
room with a glance and met Cal's guilty flush, and though she ate the
apple, she gave him no thanks--in word, look or manner. It was curious
to Hale, moreover, to observe how June's instinct deftly led her to
avoid the mistakes in dress that characterized the gropings of other
girls who, like her, were in a stage of transition. They wore gaudy
combs and green skirts with red waists, their clothes bunched at the
hips, and to their shoes and hands they paid no attention at all. None
of these things for June--and Hale did not know that the little girl had
leaped her fellows with one bound, had taken Miss Anne Saunders as her
model and was cl