Both boys lived breathlessly through a magnificent moment.
"Leave me have it!" gasped Penrod. "Leave me have hold of it!"
"You wait a minute!" Sam protested, in a whisper. "I want to show you how I do."
"No; you let me show you how _I_ do!" Penrod insisted; and they scuffled for possession.
"Look out!" Sam whispered warningly. "It might go off."
"Then you better leave me have it!" And Penrod, victorious and flushed, stepped back, the weapon in his grasp. "Here," he said, "this is the way I do: You be a crook; and suppose you got a dagger, and I--"
"I don't want any dagger," Sam protested, advancing. "I want that revolaver. It's my father's revolaver, ain't it?"
"Well, WAIT a minute, can't you? I got a right to show you the way I DO, first, haven't I?" Penrod began an improvisation on the spot. "Say I'm comin' along after dark like this--look, Sam! And say you try to make a jump at me--"
"I won't!" Sam declined this role impatiently. "I guess it ain't YOUR father's revolaver, is it?"
"Well, it may be your father's but it ain't yours," Penrod argued, becoming logical. "It ain't either'r of us revolaver, so I got as much right--"
"You haven't either. It's my fath--"
"WATCH, can't you--just a minute!" Penrod urged vehemently. "I'm not goin' to keep it, am I? You can have it when I get through, can't you? Here's how _I_ do: I'm comin' along after dark, just walkin' along this way--like this--look, Sam!"
Penrod. suiting the action to the word, walked to the other end of the room, swinging the revolver at his side with affected carelessness.
"I'm just walkin' along like this, and first I don't see you," continued the actor. "Then I kind o? get a notion sumpthing wrong's liable to happen, so I -- No!" He interrupted himself abruptly. "No; that isn't it. You wouldn't notice that I had my good ole revolaver with me. You wouldn't think I had one, because it'd be under my coat like this, and you wouldn't see it." Penrod stuck the muzzle of the pistol into the waistband of his knickerbockers at the left side and, buttoning his jacket, sustained the weapon in concealment by pressure of his elbow. "So you think I haven't got any; you think I'm just a man comin' along, and so you--"
Sam advanced. "Well, you've had your turn," he said. "Now, it's mine. I'm goin' to show you how I-- "
"WATCH me, can't you?" Penrod wailed. "I haven't showed you how _I_ do, have I? My goodness! Can't you watch me a minute?"
"I HAVE been! You said yourself it'd be my turn soon as you--"
"My goodness! Let me have a CHANCE, can't you?" Penrod retreated to the wall, turning his right side toward Sam and keeping the revolver still protected under his coat. "I got to have my turn first, haven't I?"
"Well, yours is over long ago."
"It isn't either! I--"
"Anyway," said Sam decidedly, clutching him by the right shoulder and endeavouring to reach his left side--"anyway, I'm goin' to have it now."
"You said I could have my turn out!" Penrod, carried away by indignation, raised his voice.
"I did not!" Sam, likewise lost to caution, asserted his denial loudly.
"You did, too."
"You said--"
"I never said anything!"
"You said--Quit that!"
"Boys!" Mrs. Williams, Sam's mother, opened the door of the room and stood upon the threshold. The scuffling of Sam and Penrod ceased instantly, and they stood hushed and stricken, while fear fell upon them. "Boys, you weren't quarrelling, were you?"
"Ma'am?" said Sam.
"Were you quarrelling with Penrod?"
"No, ma'am," answered Sam in a small voice.
"It sounded like it. What was the matter?"
Both boys returned her curious glance with meekness. They were summoning their faculties--which were needed. Indeed, these are the crises which prepare a boy for the business difficulties of his later life. Penrod, with the huge weapon beneath his jacket, insecurely supported by an elbow and by a waistband which he instantly began to distrust, experienced distressful sensations similar to those of the owner of too heavily insured property carrying a gasoline can under his overcoat and detained for conversation by a policeman. And if, in the coming years it was to be Penrod's lot to find himself in that precise situation, no doubt he would be the better prepared for it on account of this present afternoon's experience under the scalding eye of Mrs.
Williams. It should be added that Mrs. Williams's eye was awful to the imagination only. It was a gentle eye and but mildly curious, having no remote suspicion of the dreadful truth, for Sam had backed upon the chest of drawers and closed the damnatory open one with the calves of his legs.
Sam, not bearing the fatal evidence upon his person, was in a better state than Penrod, though when boys fall into the stillness now assumed by these two, it should be understood that they are suffering. Penrod, in fact, was the prey to apprehension so keen that the actual pit of his stomach was cold.
Being the actual custodian of the crime, he understood that his case was several degrees more serious than that of Sam, who, in the event of detection, would be convicted as only an accessory.
It was a lesson, and Penrod already repented his selfishness in not allowing Sam to show how he did, first.
"You're sure you weren't quarrelling, Sam?" said Mrs. Williams.
"No, ma'am; we were just talking."
Still she seemed dimly uneasy, and her eye swung to Penrod.
"What were you and Sam talking about, Penrod!"
"Ma'am?"
"What were you talking about?"
Penrod gulped invisibly.
"Well," he murmured, "it wasn't much. Different things."
"What things?"
"Oh, just sumpthing. Different things."
"I'm glad you weren't quarrelling," said Mrs. Williams, reassured by this reply, which, though somewhat baffling, was thoroughly familiar to her ear. "Now, if you'll come downstairs, I'll give you each one cookie and no more, so your appetites won't be spoiled for your dinners."
