crook a signal for the
note to be brought forward_.]

Piggy waded home through blood that night. The boys could not resist
calling out "Friend Mary" or "Hello, Roses Red," though each boy knew
that his taunt would bring on a fight. Piggy fought boys who were
three classes above him. He whipped groups of boys of assorted sizes
from the lower grades; but the fighting took him away from his
trouble, and in most cases he honored his combatants. He was little
the worse for wear when he chased the last swarm of primary urchins
into his father's cow lot, fastened them in, and went at them one by
one with a shingle. A child living next door to the Penningtons had
brought the news of Piggy's disgrace to the neighborhood, and by
supper-time Mrs. Pennington knew the worst. While the son and heir
of the house was bringing in his wood and doing his chores about the
barn, he felt something in the air about the kitchen which warned him
that new tortures awaited him.

[Illustration: ... _fought boys who were three classes above him ...
whipped groups of boys of assorted sizes_.]

A boy would rather take a dozen whippings at school than have the
story of one of them come home; and Piggy thought with inward
trembling that he would rather report even a whipping at home than
face his mother in the dishonor which covered him. At supper Mrs.
Pennington repeated the legend of the note with great solemnity. When
her husband showed signs of laughing, she glared at him. Her son ate
rapidly in silence. Over his mother's shoulders Piggy saw the hired
girl giggle. The only reply that Mrs. Pennington could get to her
questions was, "Aw, that ain't nothin'," or "Aw, gee whiz, ma, you
must think that's somethin'." But she proclaimed, in the presence of
the father, the son, and the hired girl, that if she ever caught a
boy of hers getting "girl-struck" she would "show him," which, being
translated, means much that no dignified young gentleman likes to
contemplate. But when the son was out of hearing, Mrs. Pennington told
her husband, in the repressed tone which she used when expressing her
diplomatic communications, that he would have "to take that boy in
hand." Whereupon the father leaned back in his chair and laughed,
laughed until he grew red in the face, laughed till the pans in the
kitchen rattled, laughed--to use the words of his wife in closing the
incident--"like a natural born simpleton."

[Illustration: _Her son ate rapidly in silence_.