ering up his bags when the elevator man called him over.

"Look at that," he said, holding the wheat before him.

Bud looked at it incredulously. "That's not mine," he said.

Young Steadman's eyes were on him exultingly. He had got even at
last, he thought.

"We'll have to see about this, Bud," the elevator man said sternly.

The other bag was emptied, and Bud saw with his own eyes that the
middle of the bag was filled with frozen wheat! He turned dizzy with
shame and rage. The machinery in the elevator with its deafening,
thump-thump-thump, seemed to be beating into his brain. He leaned
against the wall, pale and trembling.

The same instinct which prompted Tom Steadman when he hit Libby Anne
Cavers prompted him now. "I thought you said you wouldn't do such a
thing since you joined the Church," he said, with an expression of
shocked virtue.

Bud's cup of bitterness was overflowing, and at first he did not
notice what had been said.

Tom took his silence to mean that he might with safety say more. "I
guess you're not as honest as you'd like to have people think, and
joinin' the Church didn't do you so much good after all."

Bud came to himself with a rush then, and young Tom Steadman went
spinning across the floor with the blood spurting from his nose.

* * *

Bud was fined ten dollars for assault, and of course it became known
in a few hours that the cause of the trouble was that Bud had been
caught selling frozen wheat in the middle of his bags.

Through it all Bud made no word of defence. No one knew how bitter
was the sting of disgrace in the boy's soul or how he suffered. When
he went home that afternoon there was a stormy scene. "I told you I
would not sell 'plugged' wheat," he said to his father, raging with
the memory of it, "and, without letting me know, you put it in and
made me out a thief and a liar."

The old man moistened his lips. "Say, Buddie," he said, "it was too
bad you hit young Steadman; he's an overgrown slab of a boy, and I
don't mind you lickin' him, but they'll take the 'law' on ye every
time; and ten dollars was a terrible fine. Maybe they'd have let you
off with five if you'd coaxed them."

"Coax!" said Bud, scornfully. "I wouldn't coax them. What do I care
about the money, anyway? That's not what I'm kicking about."

"Oh, Buddie, you are a reckless young scamp to let ten dollars go in
one snort, and then say you don't care."

With an angry exclamation Bud turned away.

*