Short Stories of Various Types | Page 8

of ground,
to have many painful little adventures, and to get monstrously hungry
and thirsty before he happened to look in upon Penrod and Sam.
When the two boys chased him up the alley, they had no intention to
cause pain; they had no intention at all. They were no more cruel than
Duke, Penrod's little old dog, who followed his own instincts, and,
making his appearance hastily through a hole in the back fence, joined
the pursuit with sound and fury. A boy will nearly always run after
anything that is running, and his first impulse is to throw a stone at it.
This is a survival of primeval man, who must take every chance to get
his dinner. 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 preëmpted 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