“Why?  What’d you do to ’em?”

“It’s all right what I’d do!  I bet they wouldn’t want to call me that again long as they lived!”

“What’d you do if it was a little girl?  You wouldn’t hit her, would you?”

“Well, I’d——­Ouch!”

“You wouldn’t hit a little girl, would you?” the barber persisted, gathering into his powerful fingers a mop of hair from the top of Penrod’s head and pulling that suffering head into an unnatural position.  “Doesn’t the Bible say it ain’t never right to hit the weak sex?”

“Ow!  Say, look out!”

“So you’d go and punch a pore, weak, little girl, would you?” said the barber, reprovingly.

“Well, who said I’d hit her?” demanded the chivalrous Penrod.  “I bet I’d fix her though, all right.  She’d see!”

“You wouldn’t call her names, would you?”

“No, I wouldn’t!  What hurt is it to call anybody names?”

“Is that so!” exclaimed the barber.  “Then you was intending what I heard you hollering at Fisher’s grocery delivery wagon driver fer a favour, the other day when I was goin’ by your house, was you?  I reckon I better tell him, because he says to me after-WERDS if he ever lays eyes on you when you ain’t in your own yard, he’s goin’ to do a whole lot o’ things you ain’t goin’ to like!  Yessir, that’s what he says to me!”

“He better catch me first, I guess, before he talks so much.”

“Well,” resumed the barber, “that ain’t sayin’ what you’d do if a young lady ever walked up and called you a little gentleman. I want to hear what you’d do to her.  I guess I know, though—­come to think of it.”

“What?” demanded Penrod.

“You’d sick that pore ole dog of yours on her cat, if she had one, I expect,” guessed the barber derisively.

“No, I would not!”

“Well, what would you do?”

“I’d do enough.  Don’t worry about that!”

“Well, suppose it was a boy, then:  what’d you do if a boy come up to you and says, ’Hello, little gentleman’?”

“He’d be lucky,” said Penrod, with a sinister frown, “if he got home alive.”

“Suppose it was a boy twice your size?”

“Just let him try,” said Penrod ominously.  “You just let him try.  He’d never see daylight again; that’s all!”

The barber dug ten active fingers into the helpless scalp before him and did his best to displace it, while the anguished Penrod, becoming instantly a seething crucible of emotion, misdirected his natural resentment into maddened brooding upon what he would do to a boy “twice his size” who should dare to call him “little gentleman.”  The barber shook him as his father had never shaken him; the barber buffeted him, rocked him frantically to and fro; the barber seemed to be trying to wring his neck; and Penrod saw himself in staggering zigzag pictures, destroying large, screaming, fragmentary boys who had insulted him.