THE STEADFAST HEART
“I—I’d like it if he was goin’ to be here.”
“I s’pose he’ll be startin’ right in to school. Um…. The’s good boys here, but mischievous. Just you lemme tell you, Angus, the startin’ makes a heap sight of difference. Don’t you go lettin’ nobody bully you. Show right at the start you kin look out fer yourself and stand up for yourself without fear or favor….”
There it was again, the exhortation to stand up for himself. Angus looked quickly at Dave, who nodded. Mrs. Bassett already was going on:
“I call to mind how my boy come a-runnin’ home once with another boy a-chasin’ him. Bigger boy. ‘Henry,’ I called out to him from the gate, ‘you stop where you be. Don’t come runnin’ in here. You stop stock-still and give that boy a lickin’—or I calc’late to give you one myself when you git in.’ Well, Henry he sailed in pell-mell and I stood by till the job was done…. Lesson he couldn’t ’a’ learned in school.”
“I’ve got to stick up for myself,” said Angus….
That was the auspicious beginning of that phase of Angus Burke’s life which lay in the village of Emporia, of that period of education, of development, of adventures in human nature, in which he discovered that people were not
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