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"I want you fellows to understand," said Pewee, "that I'm not going to have that little Lum Risdale hurt. If you want to fight, why don't you fight somebody your own size? I don't fight babies myself," and here Pewee drew his head up, "and I don't stand by any boy that does." Poor Riley felt the last support drop from under him.
And so the poor little fellow went on, his great, disordered brain producing feverish images of terror from which he continually besought "dear good old Jack" to deliver him. When at last he dropped again into a troubled sleep, Jack slipped away and drove up the Risdale cow, and then went back to his breakfast.
The new-comer spoke in a shrill, piping voice, as strange as his weird face and withered body. "Is that your full name?" asked the master. "No, sir," piped the strange little creature. "Give your full name," said Mr. Ball, sternly. "My name is Christopher Columbus George Washington Marquis de Lafayette Risdale."
He could not have been more than ten years old, to judge by his size, but there was a look of premature oldness in his face. "Come here!" said the master, when he caught sight of him. "What is your name?" And Mr. Ball took out his book to register the new-comer, with much the same relish that the Giant Despair showed when he had bagged a fresh pilgrim. "Columbus Risdale."
The whole town will want to ship you two fellows off before night, and Pewee isn't going to fight your battles. What do you think, Pewee, of fellows that put powder in a stove where they might blow up a lot of little children? What do you think of two fellows that want me to keep quiet after they let little Lum Risdale take a whipping for them, and that talk about setting you on to me if I tell?"
"No, you daren't snow-ball me," said Jack, squeezing another ball and throwing it into Riley's shirt-front with a certainty of aim that showed that he knew how to play ball. "Take that one, too, and if you bother Lum Risdale again, I'll make you pay for it. Take a boy of your size." And with that he moulded yet another ball, but Riley retreated to the other side of the school-house.
When the fourth-reader class was called, and Harvey Collins and Susie Lanham and some others of the nearly grown-up pupils came forward, with Jack Dudley as quite the youngest of the class, the great-eyed, emaciated little Columbus Risdale picked himself up on his pipe-stems and took his place at the end of this row. It was too funny for anything!
The effect of this from the hundred-year-old baby was so striking and so ludicrous that everybody was amused, while all were surprised at the excellence of his reading. The master proceeded, however, to whip one or two of the boys for laughing. When recess-time arrived, Susan Lanham came to Jack with a request. "I wish you'd look after little Lummy Risdale. He's a sort of cousin of my mother's.
"I don't want," said he, "to seem to have gone daft on the subject of marriage, and I see no reason why you should be in any haste about it. Certainly I should hate to lose you, my child, but Hartley as the next Lord Risdale is undoubtedly a good match. And you say you like him." The girl looked up with a sort of defiance, and her face was a little flushed. "I don't love him," she said.
All were at play in the sunshine, excepting Columbus Risdale, who sat solitary, like a disconsolate screech-owl, in one corner of the room.
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