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Updated: June 17, 2025
As for the black bread, some nibbling visitor of the night had helped himself to one corner of it, and this corner, therefore, went at once to the birds. "My goodness!" soliloquized Johnnie. "How the mice do love Mrs. Kukor's bread!" And he could not blame them. It was so good!
"Got any spellers to-day?" he inquired casually just to show them all that he knew a thing or two about books. "In several languages," returned the man, quite calmly. "I like Aladdin better," announced Johnnie. Then trying not to sound too proud, "I got it here with me right now." Whereupon he reached into the baggy shirt and drew forth Mrs. Kukor's gift. "Bless his heart!" cried a woman.
At other times, he kept it tight shut. Often when old Grandpa was asleep by the stove, Johnnie would tiptoe to that door, lean against the jamb of it, and listen. And he told Cis that he could plainly hear creakings! But this morning he felt none of his usual nervousness, so taken up was his mind with Mrs. Kukor's mystery. Swiftly but carefully he made the two beds.
She was flushed. Cautiously she shut the door behind her. "I've been up on Mrs. Kukor's stairs, waiting," she half whispered. Under one arm she was carrying a long, satiny-white box. "Another doll?" demanded Johnnie, astonished and disappointed. To him any long, white box could mean nothing else. However, he rose, unable to be entirely indifferent even to a new doll.
It was almost as if some malign genie were working against him. "Mrs. Kukor's away, too," he said. "And with Cis gone " He swallowed hard. One-Eye began to talk in a husky monotone, as if to himself. "They's nobody else jes' like her," he declared; "that's a cinch! She's shore the kind that comes one in a box!
And it was lucky that he did; for when Cis's brief schooldays came to an end, Big Tom took the two textbooks out with him one morning and sold them. The directory was the prized gift of Mrs. Kukor's daughter, Mrs. The directory meant more to Johnnie than ever had Cis's books. He knew its small-typed pages from end to end.
Kukor's stand. Backed by her, he meant to keep the book and read it every minute he could. So with Big Tom once more in the kitchen, having an after-supper pipe in the morris chair, Johnnie ignored Cis's silent invitation to join her in the window, and brought his bedding from her room, spreading it out ostentatiously beside the stove.
Kukor's flat then twice more then once again. It was the book signal! Johnnie gasped. And Cis stopped crying, turning on him a look that was full of frightened inquiry. He tipped back his head, to stare at the ceiling as if striving to see through it, and he held his breath, listening. During the quarrel, he had not thought of Mrs. Kukor, nor heard any sound from above. Was she at home?
"Oh, Johnnie," she cried again, having taken a second view of him from still another angle, and in another light, "that khaki's almost the color of your hair!" which partly took the joy out of things! Yet, under the circumstances, no pang of any sort could endure very long. Particularly as following the proper signal Johnnie went to Mrs. Kukor's, Cis at his brown heels.
Kukor's sink, debouched in turn into the Barber sink. A moment's wait. Then some one began to cross the floor overhead with an astonishing sound of rocking yet with little advance in the way that a walking doll goes forward. This was Mrs. Kukor herself, who was motherhood incarnate to Johnnie; motherhood boiled down into an unalloyed lump; the pure essence of it in a fat, round package.
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