The new boy came over briskly, and made a feint to slap the naked lad, who warded off the blow, sniffling, “You just leave me alone. I ain’t hurtin’ you.” The boys in the water laughed—it seemed to Mealy such a cruel laugh. Anger enveloped him again, and he struck out blindly through his tears, hand over hand, striking the new boy in the mouth and making it bleed, before he realized that the fight had begun. The new boy tried to clinch Mealy, but the naked body slipped away from him; and just then the combatants saw the satisfied grin freeze on the faces of the boys in the water. A step crunched the gravel near them, and in a moment that flashed vividly with rejoicing that the fight was ended, then with abject, chattering terror, Mealy Jones saw his father approaching. Mealy did not run. The uplifted cane and the red, perspiring face of his father transfixed the lad, yet he felt called upon to say something. His voice came from a dry throat, and he spoke through an idiotic grin as he said, “I didn’t know you wanted me, pa.”
After the burst of his father’s anger ten awful minutes of shame passed for Mealy while he was putting on his wet clothes. The boys in the water swam noiselessly upstream to the roots of the elm-tree, where he saw them looking at his disgrace. During those ten minutes Mealy realized that his father’s deepening silence portended evil; so he tried to draw his father into a discussion of the merits of the case by whimpering from time to time, “Well, I guess they ast me to come,” or “Piggy said it wouldn’t hurt, ’cause ’t ain’t in dog days,” or “I wasn’t in where it was deep. I was only a-wadin’.” The new boy, who was seated upon a log near by with a stone in his hand, which he had picked up fearing the elder Jones would join the fray, sniffed audibly. He called to the other boys derisively, “Say, any of you boys got the baby’s blocks?” It did not lift the mantle of humiliation that covered Mealy to hear his father reply to the new boy, “That will do for you, sir.” While Mealy wept he wiped away his tears first with one hand and then with the other, employing the free hand in fastening his clothes together. He did not fear the punishment that might be in store for him. He was thinking of the agony of his next meeting with Piggy Pennington. Mealy fancied that Abe Carpenter, who was a quiet, philosophical boy, would not tease him, but horror seized him when he thought of Piggy.
As Mealy fastened his last button, he felt his father’s finger under his collar, and his own feet shambling blindly over the pebbles, up the path, into the bushes; he heard the boys in the water laugh with the new boy, and then—stories differ. The boys say that he howled lustily, “Oh, pa, I won’t do it any more,” over and over again. Mealy Jones says that it didn’t hurt a bit.
[Illustration: He felt his father’s finger under his collar and his own feet shambling.]