“Yes—­you always use bread for stuffing, don’t you?  I want to be stuffed.  All the way home my b—­my stomerch was a-flopping against my backbone, just like Dick’s.  Only Dick said—­”

“Never mind what Dick said.”  Mrs. Kate thrust the bread toward him, half buttered.

“Dick’s mad, I guess.  He’s mad at Ford, too.”

Buddy regarded his mother gravely over the slice of bread.

“First I’ve heard of it,” Ford remarked lightly.  “I think you must be mistaken, old-timer.”

But Buddy never considered himself mistaken about anything, and he did not like being told that he was, even when the pill was sweetened with the term “old-timer.”  He rolled his eyes at Ford resentfully.

“Dick is mad!  He got mad when you galloped over where Jo’s red ribbon was hanging onto a bush.  I saw him a-scowling when you rolled it up and put it in your shirt pocket.  Dick wanted that ribbon for his bridle; and you better give it to him.  Jo ain’t your girl.  She’s Dick’s girl.  And you have to tie the ribbon of your bestest girl on your bridle.  That’s why,” he added, with belated gallantry, “I tie my own mamma’s ribbons on mine.  And,” he returned with terrible directness to the real issue, “Jo’s Dick’s girl, ’cause he said so.  I heard him tell Jim Felton she’s his steady, all right—­and you are his girl, ain’t you, Jo?”

His mother had tried at first to stop him, had given up in despair, and was now sitting in a rather tragic calm, waiting for what might come of his speech.

Josephine might have saved herself some anxious moments, if she had been so minded; perhaps she would have been minded, if she had not caught Ford’s eyes fixed rather intently upon her, and sensed the expectancy in them.  She bit her lip, and then she laughed.

“A man shouldn’t make an assertion of that sort,” she said quizzically, in the direction of Buddy—­though her meaning went straight across the table to another—­“unless he has some reason for feeling very sure.”

Buddy tried to appear quite clear as to her meaning.  “Well, if you are Dick’s girl, then you better make Ford give that ribbon—­”

“I have plenty of ribbons, Buddy,” Josephine interrupted, smiling at him still.  “Don’t you want one?”

“I tie my own mamma’s ribbons on my bridle,” Buddy rebuffed.  “My mamma is my girl—­you ain’t.  You can give your ribbons to Dick.”

“Mamma won’t be your girl if you don’t stop talking so much at the table—­and elsewhere,” Mrs. Kate informed him sternly, with a glance of trepidation at the others.  “A little boy mustn’t talk about grown-ups, and what they do or say.”

“What can I talk about, then?  The boys talk about their girls all the time—­”

“I wish to goodness I had let you go with your dad.  I shall not let you eat with us, anyway, if you don’t keep quiet.  You’re getting perfectly impossible.”  Which even Buddy understood as a protest which was not to be taken seriously.