promptly proceeded to do. It was a wild and
painful time. But though Sam was two years older, he was barely any
larger than I, and when he and his gang had gone off with my boat, as I
stood there breathing hard, I was filled with a grim satisfaction. For
once when he tried to wrench the boat from me I had hit him with it
right on the face, and I had had a glimpse of a thick red mark across
his cheek. I tasted something new in my mouth and spit it out. It was
blood. I did this several times, slowly and impressively, till it made a
good big spot on the railroad tie at my feet. Then I walked with dignity
back across the tracks and up "the way of destruction" home. I walked
slowly, planning as I went. At the gate I climbed up on it and swung.
Then with a sudden loud cry I fell off and ran back into the garden
crying, "I fell off the gate! I fell on my face!" So my cut and swollen
lip was explained, and my trips were not discovered.

I felt myself growing older fast. For I knew that I could both fight and
tell lies, besides defying the Condor.

In the next years, for weeks at a time my life was centered on Sam and
his gang. How we became friends, how often we met, by just what means I
evaded my nurse, all these details are vague to me now. I am not even
sure I was never caught. But it seems to me that I was not. For as I
grew to be eight years old, Belle turned her attention more and more to
that impish little sister of mine who was always up to some mischief or
other. There was the corner grocer, too, with whom I pretended to be
staunch friends. "I'm going to see the grocer," I would say, when I
heard Sam's cautious whistle in front of the house--and so presently I
would join the gang. I followed Sam with a doglike devotion, giving up
my weekly twenty-five cents instead of saving it for Christmas, and in
return receiving from him all the world-old wisdom stored in that
bullet-shaped head of his which sat so tight on his round little
shoulders.

And though I did not realize it then, in my tense crowded childhood,
through Sam and his companions I learned something else that was to
stand me in good stead years later on. I learned how to make friends
with "the slums." I discovered that by making friends with "Micks" and
"Dockers" and the like, you find they are no fearful goblins, giants
bursting savagely up among the flowers of your life, but people as human
as yourself, or rather, much more human, because they live so clos