“Uhm-m-m—­no fair splashin’,” he whined.

Mealy put one foot in the water and drew it out quickly, gasping, “Oo!  I ain’t goin’ in.  It’s too cold for me.  It’ll bring my measles out.”  He started—­trembling—­up the bank; then he heard a splashing behind him.

“Come back here,” cried Piggy, whose hands were uplifted; “come back here and git in this water or I’ll muddy you.”  Piggy’s hands were full of mud.  He was about to throw it when the Jones boy pretended to laugh and giggled, “Oh, I was just a-foolin’.”

But he paused again at the water’s edge, and Piggy, who had come up close enough to touch the rickety lad, reached out a muddy hand and dabbed the quaking boy’s breast.  The other boys roared with glee.  Mealy extended a deprecatory hand, and took Piggy’s wet, glistening arm and stumbled nervously into the stream, with an “Oo-oo!” at every uncertain step.  When the water came to Mealy’s waist Abe cried, “Duck! duck, or I’ll splash you!” The boy sank down, with his teeth biting his tongue as he said, “Oo!  I wouldn’t do you that way.”

When the shock of the tepid water had spent itself, Mealy’s grin returned, and he shivered happily, “Oo—­it’s good, ain’t it?”

Ten minutes later the boys were diving from the roots of the elm-tree into the deep water on the other side of the creek.  Ten minutes after that they were sliding down a muddy toboggan which they had revived by splashing water upon the incline made and provided by the town boys for scudding.  Ten minutes afterward they were covering themselves with coats of mud, adorned—­one with stripes made with the point of a stick, another with polka-dots, another with checks, and Mealy with snake-like, curving stripes.  Then the whole crew dashed down the path to the railroad bridge to greet the afternoon passenger train.  When it came they jumped up and down and waved their striped and spotted arms like the barbarian warriors which they fancied they were.  They swam up the stream leisurely, and, as they rounded the bend that brought their landing-place into view, the quick eye of Piggy Pennington saw that some one had been meddling with their clothes.  He gave the alarm.  The boys quickened their strokes.  When they came to the shallows of the ford they saw the blue-and-white starched shirt of Mealy Jones lying in a pool tied into half a dozen knots, with the water soaking them tighter and tighter.  The other boys’ clothes were not disturbed.

“Mealy’s got to chaw beef,” cried Piggy Pennington.  The other boys echoed Piggy’s merriment.  Great sorrows come to grown-up people, but there is never a moment in after-life more poignant with grief than, that which stabs a boy when he learns that he must wrestle with a series of water-soaked knots in a shirt.  As Mealy sat in the broiling sun, gripping the knots with his teeth and fingers, he asked himself again and again how he could explain his soiled shirt to his mother.  Lump after lump rose in his throat, and dissolved into tears that trickled down his nose.  The other boys did not heed him.  They were following Piggy’s dare, dropping into the water from the overhanging limb of the elm-tree.