“Here, Chris,” invited Danny, “take your bite next.”

Jerry became immediately suspicious at such unaccustomed politeness on Danny’s part and he was not at all surprised when Danny, once the remainder of the apple was again in his hands, took to his heels.

“Save me a bite!” cried Celia Jane, swallowing the morsel in her mouth so quickly that she came near to choking, and tagged after her older brother as fast as she could run.

“Danny!” cried Jerry.  “That’s no fair!”

He started to run after the vanishing apple, but was quickly passed, first by Chris and then by Nora, who called back to him:  “Maybe I can save the core for you, Jerry.”

Bitterness arose in Jerry’s soul.  He knew that he couldn’t catch up with Danny, but he kept on running.  That old, odd feeling that he did not belong to the Mullarkeys, though living with them, came over him again, and he had already begun to slow down his pace when he was brought to a full and sudden stop by a picture blazoned on a billboard.

He stared spellbound, without even winking.  Of all delectable things, it was the picture of an elephant!  A purple elephant jumping over a green fence, its trunk raised high in the air until it almost touched the full, red moon at the top of the poster.  The elephant had such a roguish and knowing look in his small eyes and such a smirk on his funny little mouth that Jerry began to smile without being the least bit conscious that he was doing so.

The smile kept spreading in complete understanding of the look on the elephant’s face and he probably would have laughed aloud had not the picture somehow made him think of something, he couldn’t just remember what.  A dim idea seemed to be trying to break into his mind but couldn’t find the right door.  In his effort to puzzle out what it was the elephant made him think of, Jerry entirely forgot the large red apple and the perfidy of Danny.

“What’re you lookin’ at?” called Danny, who had stopped half a block farther on when he no longer heard Jerry’s pursuing footsteps.

Jerry did not answer.  Instead, he squatted down on the grassy bank between the sidewalk and the billboard and feasted his eyes on that delightfully extravagant elephant which seemed almost to wink at him.  Jerry half expected to see the elephant grab the moon and balance it on the end of his trunk, or toss it up into the sky and catch it again as it fell.

“Come on, Jerry, if you want the core,” called Danny again.  “That’s all that’s left.”

“Don’t want the core,” said Jerry.  “It was my apple.  The lady gave it to me.”  He didn’t even look at Danny but kept staring at the very purple elephant and the very red moon almost on the tip-end of his trunk.  He just wouldn’t let Danny Mullarkey know that it made any difference to him whether Danny and Chris and Nora and Celia Jane liked him very much or not.

No, and he wouldn’t feel so terribly bad if Mother ’Larkey and little Kathleen didn’t like him, either.