But at thirteen Shelley was losing a lot of the angel out of his face.  His life of battle had told on him, I guess.  But he was still obedient and carried the cross for his mother’s sake.  Poor thing!  He’d formed the habit of obedience and never once suspicioned that a woman had no right to impose on him just because she was his mother.  Shelley just took to fighting a little quicker.  He wouldn’t wait for words always.  Sometimes mere looks of disgust would start him.

Then, when he got to near fourteen, still with the beautiful curls, he begun to get a lovely golden down on his face; and the face hadn’t hardly a trace of angel left in it.  The horrible truth was that Shelley not only needed a haircut but a shave.  And one day, goaded by certain taunts, he told his mother this in a suddenly bass voice.  It must of startled Arline, having this roar come out of her child when his little voice had always been sweet and high.  So she burst into some more tears and Shelley asked her forgiveness, and pretty soon she was curling his hair again.  I guess he knew right then it was for the last time on earth, but nothing warned the mother.

These new taunts that had finally made a man of Shelley was no taunts from boys, which he could handle easy, but the taunts of heedless girls, who naturally loathed a boy with curls even more than male humans of any age loathe him; and girls can be a lot tauntier when they start out to.  Well, Shelley couldn’t lick girls, and he had reached an age when their taunts cut into his hide like whiplashes, so he knew right well he had to do something desperate.

Then he went out and run away from the refining influences of his beautiful home.  He took to the hills and landed way up on the north fork of the Kulanche where Liver-eating Johnson has a sheep ranch.  Liver-eating, who is an unsavory character himself, had once heard Shelley address a small group of critics in front of the post office, and had wanted to adopt him right there.  He still cherished the fondest memories of Shelley’s flow of language, so he was tickled to death to have him drop along and stop, seeing that though but a lad in years he was a man and brother in speech, even if he did look like a brother that had started out to be a sister and got mixed.

Liver-eating took him in and fed him and cut his hair with a pair of sheep shears.  It was a more or less rough job, because shearing sheep does not make a man a good human barber by any means.  But Shelley looked at his head in the glass and said it was the most beautiful haircut in the world.  Fussy people might criticize it here and there, but they could never say it hadn’t really been cut.

He was so grateful to Liver-eating that he promised to stay with him always and become a sheep herder.  And he did hide out there several months till his anguished mother found out where he was.  After having every pond dragged and every bit of woods searched for her boy’s body she had believed he’d been carried off by kidnappers on account of his heavenly beauty, and she’d probably have to give ten thousand dollars for his release.  She was still looking for a letter from these fiends when she learned about his being with Liver-eating Johnson and that this wretch had committed sacrilege on him.