From the hour of the Jones boy’s triumph, he and Winfield Hancock Pennington—­familiarly known as “Piggy”—­became boon companions.  A grown-up outsider might have wondered at such a friendship, for Harold Jones was a pale, thin youth, with a squeaky voice.  His skimmed-milk eyes popped out over a waste of freckles which blurred his features and literally weighted down a weak, loosely-wired jaw and kept an astonished mouth opened for hours at a time.  Piggy, on the other hand, was a sturdy, chunky, blue-eyed boy, who had fought his way up to glory in the school, and who had run and jumped, and tumbled and dived, and bantered himself into the right to be King of Boyville.  Chummery between the two boys seemed impossible, yet it was one of the things which every school expects in a certain crisis.  When the affair is reversed, the two little girls go about breathing undying hatred for one another.  But a boy begins to consume his rival with politeness, to seek him out from all other beings on earth, to study his tastes and cater to his humors.  And so, while the comradeship between Piggy Pennington and Mealy Jones was built on ashes, its growth was beautiful to see.

[Illustration:  Harold Jones]

[Illustration:  To study his tastes.]

[Illustration:  ... the comradeship ... was beautiful to see]

In all their hours of close communion neither boy mentioned to the other the name of the little girl in the red shawl and the paint-brush pig-tails whose fitful fancy had brought on all his trouble.  In some mysterious way each managed to shower her with picture cards, to compass her about with oranges, to embower her desk with flowers; but it was all done in stealth, and she who was the object of this devotion rewarded it openly and—­alas for the vanity of her sex—­impartially.  All the school watched the battle of the hearts eagerly.  The big boys, who usually know as little about the social transactions beneath them as the teacher knows, felt an inkling of the situation.  The red-headed Pratt girl became deeply interested in the affair, though she was never invited to a party in the school’s aristocracy.  She did not even get an invitation to Bud Perkins’s surprise party, where every one who had any social standing was expected.  Yet she saw all that went on in the school, and once she all but smiled sympathetically at Piggy, when she met him slipping away from his Heart’s Desire’s desk, in which he had left a flock of Cupids nestling on a perfumed blotter, and a candy sheep.  Mealy Jones would have snubbed the Pratt girl if she had caught him thus, but Piggy gave her a wink that made her his partner.  After that hour the Pratt girl became his scout.  The next day she blundered.  That Friday was burned into Piggy Pennington’s memory with a glowing brand.

[Illustration:  The red-headed Pratt girl.]