Short Stories of Various Types | Page 8

So, when Penrod and Sam drove the hapless Whitey up the alley, they were really responding to an impulse thousands and thousands of years old--an impulse founded upon the primordial observation that whatever runs is likely to prove edible. Penrod and Sam were not "bad"; they were never that. They were something which was not their fault; they were historic.
At the next corner Whitey turned to the right into the cross-street; thence, turning to the right again and still warmly pursued, he zigzagged down a main thoroughfare until he reached another cross-street, which ran alongside the Schofields' yard and brought him to the foot of the alley he had left behind in his flight. He entered the alley, and there his dim eye fell upon the open door he had previously investigated. No memory of it remained, but the place had a look associated in his mind with hay, and as Sam and Penrod turned the corner of the alley in panting yet still vociferous pursuit, Whitey stumbled up the inclined platform before the open doors, staggered thunderously across the carriage-house and through another open door into a stall, an apartment vacant since the occupancy of Mr. Schofield's last horse, now several years deceased.
II
The two boys shrieked with excitement as they beheld the coincidence of this strange return. They burst into the stable, making almost as much noise as Duke, who had become frantic at the invasion. Sam laid hands upon a rake.
"You get out o' there, you ole horse, you!" he bellowed. "I ain't afraid to drive him out. I----"
"Wait a minute!" shouted Penrod. "Wait till I----"
Sam was manfully preparing to enter the stall.
"You hold the doors open," he commanded, "so's they won't blow shut and keep him in here. I'm goin' to hit him with----"
"Quee-yut!" Penrod shouted, grasping the handle of the rake so that Sam could not use it. "Wait a minute, can't you?" He turned with ferocious voice and gestures upon Duke. "Duke!" And Duke, in spite of his excitement, was so impressed that he prostrated himself in silence, and then unobtrusively withdrew from the stable. Penrod ran to the alley doors and closed them.
"My gracious!" Sam protested. "What you goin' to do?"
"I'm goin' to keep this horse," said Penrod, whose face showed the strain of a great idea.
"What for?"
"For the reward," said Penrod simply.
Sam sat down in the wheelbarrow and stared at his friend almost with awe.
"My gracious," he said, "I never thought o' that! How--how much do you think we'll get, Penrod?"
Sam's thus admitting himself to a full partnership in the enterprise met no objection from Penrod, who was absorbed in the contemplation of Whitey.
"Well," he said judicially, "we might get more and we might get less."
Sam rose and joined his friend in the doorway opening upon the two stalls. Whitey had pre?mpted the nearer, and was hungrily nuzzling the old frayed hollows in the manger.
"May be a hundred dollars--or sumpthing?" Sam asked in a low voice.
Penrod maintained his composure and repeated the new-found expression which had sounded well to him a moment before. He recognized it as a symbol of the non-committal attitude that makes people looked up to. "Well"--he made it slow, and frowned--"we might get more and we might get less."
"More'n a hundred dollars?" Sam gasped.
"Well," said Penrod, "we might get more and we might get less." This time, however, he felt the need of adding something. He put a question in an indulgent tone, as though he were inquiring, not to add to his own information but to discover the extent of Sam's. "How much do you think horses are worth, anyway?"
"I don't know," said Sam frankly, and, unconsciously, he added, "They might be more and they might be less."
"Well, when our ole horse died," said Penrod, "papa said he wouldn't taken five hundred dollars for him. That's how much horses are worth!"
"My gracious!" Sam exclaimed. Then he had a practical afterthought. "But maybe he was a better horse than this'n. What color was he?"
"He was bay. Looky here, Sam"--and now Penrod's manner changed from the superior to the eager--"you look what kind of horses they have in a circus, and you bet a circus has the best horses, don't it? Well, what kind of horses do they have in a circus? They have some black and white ones, but the best they have are white all over. Well, what kind of a horse is this we got here? He's perty near white right now, and I bet if we washed him off and got him fixed up nice he would be white. Well, a bay horse is worth five hundred dollars, because that's what papa said, and this horse----"
Sam interrupted rather timidly.
"He--he's awful bony, Penrod. You don't guess that'd make any----"
Penrod laughed contemptuously.
"Bony! All he needs is a little