“’Good money’?” repeated Margaret, curiously.  “What is ‘good’ money?”

Penrod turned upon her a stern glance.  “Say, wouldn’t you be just as happy if you had some sense?”

“Penrod!” shouted his father.  But Penrod’s mother gazed with dismay at her son:  he had never before spoken like that to his sister.

Mrs. Schofield might have been more dismayed than she was, if she had realized that it was the beginning of an epoch.  After dinner, Penrod was slightly scalded in the back as the result of telling Della, the cook, that there was a wart on the middle finger of her right hand.  Della thus proving poor material for his new manner to work upon, he approached Duke, in the backyard, and, bending double, seized the lowly animal by the forepaws.

“I let you know my name’s Penrod Schofield,” hissed the boy.  He protruded his underlip ferociously, scowled, and thrust forward his head until his nose touched the dog’s.  “And you better look out when Penrod Schofield’s around, or you’ll get in big trouble!  You UNDERSTAN’ that, ’bo?”

The next day, and the next, the increasing change in Penrod puzzled and distressed his family, who had no idea of its source.

How might they guess that hero-worship takes such forms?  They were vaguely conscious that a rather shabby boy, not of the neighbourhood, came to “play” with Penrod several times; but they failed to connect this circumstance with the peculiar behaviour of the son of the house, whose ideals (his father remarked) seemed to have suddenly become identical with those of Gyp the Blood.

Meanwhile, for Penrod himself, “life had taken on new meaning, new richness.”  He had become a fighting man—­in conversation at least.  “Do you want to know how I do when they try to slip up on me from behind?” he asked Della.  And he enacted for her unappreciative eye a scene of fistic manoeuvres wherein he held an imaginary antagonist helpless in a net of stratagems.

Frequently, when he was alone, he would outwit, and pummel this same enemy, and, after a cunning feint, land a dolorous stroke full upon a face of air.  “There!  I guess you’ll know better next time.  That’s the way we do up at the Third!”

Sometimes, in solitary pantomime, he encountered more than one opponent at a time, for numbers were apt to come upon him treacherously, especially at a little after his rising hour, when he might be caught at a disadvantage—­perhaps standing on one leg to encase the other in his knickerbockers.  Like lightning, he would hurl the trapping garment from him, and, ducking and pivoting, deal great sweeping blows among the circle of sneaking devils. (That was how he broke the clock in his bedroom.) And while these battles were occupying his attention, it was a waste of voice to call him to breakfast, though if his mother, losing patience, came to his room, she would find him seated on the bed pulling at a stocking.  “Well, ain’t I coming fast as I can?”