United States or Peru ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Jim passed her often on the street, walking small-boy fashion with her hands in her pockets and he knew that with her inseparable Sally Carrol Hopper she had left a trail of broken hearts from Atlanta to New Orleans. For a few fleeting moments Jim wished he could dance.
He had the reddest hair Val had ever seen and the homeliest face but his small-boy grin was friendliness itself. "Go away," she repeated stubbornly. "Nope!" He shook his head firmly. "I'm staying right here until you forget that for at least a minute." He motioned toward the picture. With a sigh she put down her brush. "I suppose I'll have to humor you."
Hesitatingly he sought to make vivid his small-boy life in the hills of West Virginia: carving initials, mowing lawns, smoking corn silk, being arrested on Hallowe'en, his father's death, a certain Irving who was his friend, "carrying a paper route" during two years of high school. His determination to "make something of himself."
While I do not believe bears guilty of the many offenses charged them, I am sure that they had been the "life of the party" at many a camp, having been led out of their retirement by their small-boy curiosity.
Even after the new addition to the Button family had had his hair cut short and then dyed to a sparse unnatural black, had had his face shaved so dose that it glistened, and had been attired in small-boy clothes made to order by a flabbergasted tailor, it was impossible for Button to ignore the fact that his son was a poor excuse for a first family baby.
The strange voice belonged to a high-school boy, Stanley Reeves, and both Tim and Charlie knew he was a member of the gymnasium wrestling team and quite capable of stopping any small-boy fight. "You're too old to fight a boy of that size, anyway," declared Stanley, surveying Tim with disgust. "But I'm going to punch him," announced Bobby heatedly. "Oh, you are?" said Reeves with interest.
Fantastic and all "subjective" that I should attribute a part of their interest, or that of the scene spreading round them, to any competent perception, in the small-boy mind, that the general or public moment had a rarity and a brevity, a sharp intensity, of its own; ruffling all things, as they came, with the morning breath of the Second Empire and making them twinkle back with a light of resigned acceptance, a freshness of cynicism, the force of a great grimacing example.
Then they were on the ladder once more as the ship shook under them, plates buckling as a great wound tore three decks apart. Raf laughed recklessly. Now that he was committed to this course, he had a small-boy delight in the destruction. "They won't raise her again in a hurry," he confided to Dalgard. But the other did not share his triumph. "They come we must move fast," the scout urged.
Charlie, with his childish but utter hero-worship; Charlie, with his lighted candle; Charlie, with his small-boy love and trust Charlie would be told some little story and Charlie would soon forget. But what would Charlie think of him some day when the truth was out Charlie who at five could set his teeth and bear pain stoically because his hero did! Because he was "His Boy!"
Then a dash through an ancient grape arbor, and they were lost to view of the road. Some reckless small boys scampered after, but the majority preferred to trace the progress of the conflict by the aboriginal "Yerwhoops" that came from somewhere in behind the old houses. "There they go!" piped up a shrill voice of the small-boy brigade.