But to-night, evidently, there was to be no ball.  Buzz ate little.  His mother, forever between the stove and the table, ate less.  But that was nothing unusual in her.  She waited on the others, but mostly she hovered about the boy.

“Ernie, you ain’t eaten your potatoes.  Look how nice an’ mealy they are.”

“Don’t want none.”

“Ernie, would you rather have a baked apple than the raspberry preserve?  I fixed a pan this morning.”

“Naw.  Lemme alone.  I ain’t hungry.”

He slouched from the table.  Minnie, teacup in hand, regarded him over its rim with wide, malicious eyes.  “I saw that Kearney girl go by here before supper, and she rubbered in like everything.”

“You’re a liar,” said Buzz, unemotionally.

“I did so!  She went by and then she came back again.  I saw her both times.  Say, I guess I ought to know her.  Anybody in town’d know Kearney.”

Buzz had been headed toward the front porch.  He hesitated and turned, now, and picked up the newspaper from the sitting-room sofa.  Pa Werner, in trousers, shirt and suspenders, was padding about the kitchen with his pipe and tobacco.  He came into the sitting room now and stood a moment, his lips twisted about the pipe-stem.  The pipe’s putt-putting gave warning that he was about to break into unaccustomed speech.  He regarded Buzz with beady, narrowed eyes.

“You let me see you around with that Kearney girl and I’ll break every bone in your body, and hers too.  The hussy!”

“Oh, you will, will you?”

Ma, who had been making countless trips from the kitchen to the back garden with water pail and sprinkling can sagging from either arm, put in a word to stay the threatening storm.  “Now, Pa!  Now, Ernie!” The two men subsided into bristling silence.

Suddenly, “There she is again!” shrilled Minnie, from her bedroom.  Buzz shrank back in his chair.  Old man Werner, with a muttered oath, went to the open doorway and stood there, puffing savage little spurts of smoke streetward.  The Kearney girl stared brazenly at him as she strolled slowly by, a slim and sinister figure.  Old man Werner watched her until she passed out of sight.

“You go gettin’ mixed up with dirt like that,” threatened he, “and I’ll learn you.  She’ll be hangin’ around the mill yet, the brass-faced thing.  If I hear of it I’ll get the foreman to put her off the place.  You’ll stay home to-night.  Carry a pail of water for your ma once.”

“Carry it yourself.”

Buzz, with a wary eye up the street, slouched out to the front porch, into the twilight of the warm May evening.  Charley Lembke, from his porch across the street, called to him:  “Goin’ down town?”

“Yeh, I guess so.”

“Ain’t you afraid of bein’ pinched?” Buzz turned his head quickly toward the room just behind him.  He turned to go in.  Charley’s voice came again, clear and far-reaching.  “I hear you had a run-in with Hatton’s son, and knocked him down.  Some class t’ you, Buzz, even if it does cost you your job.”