id, with the slight swagger of young
and conscious genius. "Of course, I had to slip in and shake her up
sometimes, so's they wouldn't notice."

"But what did you put in it to make it look like that?"

Penrod, upon the point of replying, happened to glance toward the house.
His gaze, lifting, rested for a moment upon a window. The head of Mrs.
Schofield was framed in that window. She nodded gayly to her son. She
could see him plainly, and she thought that he seemed perfectly healthy,
and as happy as a boy could be. She was right.

"What DID you put in it?" Sam insisted.

And probably it was just as well that, though Mrs. Schofield could see
her son, the distance was too great for her to hear him.

"Oh, nothin'," Penrod replied. "Nothin' but a little good ole mud."

CHAPTER XII. GIPSY

On a fair Saturday afternoon in November Penrod's little old dog Duke
returned to the ways of his youth and had trouble with a strange cat on
the back porch. This indiscretion, so uncharacteristic, was due to the
agitation of a surprised moment, for Duke's experience had inclined
him to a peaceful pessimism, and he had no ambition for hazardous
undertakings of any sort. He was given to musing but not to avoidable
action, and he seemed habitually to hope for something that he was
pretty sure would not happen. Even in his sleep, this gave him an air of
wistfulness.

Thus, being asleep in a nook behind the metal refuse-can, when the
strange cat ventured to ascend the steps of the porch, his appearance
was so unwarlike that the cat felt encouraged to extend its field of
reconnaissance for the cook had been careless, and the backbone of a
three-pound whitefish lay at the foot of the refuse-can.

This cat was, for a cat, needlessly tall, powerful, independent and
masculine. Once, long ago, he had been a roly-poly pepper-and-salt
kitten; he had a home in those days, and a name, "Gipsy," which he
abundantly justified. He was precocious in dissipation. Long before his
adolescence, his lack of domesticity was ominous, and he had formed bad
companionships. Meanwhile, he grew so rangy, and developed such length
and power of leg and such traits of character, that the father of the
little girl who owned him was almost convincing when he declared that
the young cat was half broncho and half Malay pirate--though, in the
light of Gipsy's later career, this seems bitterly unfair to even the
lowest orders of bronchos and Malay pirates.

No; G