The torture stopped suddenly; and clenched, weeping eyes began to see again, while the barber applied cooling lotions which made Penrod smell like a coloured housemaid’s ideal.

“Now what,” asked the barber, combing the reeking locks gently, “what would it make you so mad fer, to have somebody call you a little gentleman?  It’s a kind of compliment, as it were, you might say.  What would you want to hit anybody fer that fer?”

To the mind of Penrod, this question was without meaning or reasonableness.  It was within neither his power nor his desire to analyze the process by which the phrase had become offensive to him, and was now rapidly assuming the proportions of an outrage.  He knew only that his gorge rose at the thought of it.

“You just let ’em try it!” he said threateningly, as he slid down from the chair.  And as he went out of the door, after further conversation on the same subject, he called back those warning words once more:  “Just let ’em try it!  Just once—­that’s all I ask ’em to.  They’ll find out what they get!”

The barber chuckled.  Then a fly lit on the barber’s nose and he slapped at it, and the slap missed the fly but did not miss the nose.  The barber was irritated.  At this moment his birdlike eye gleamed a gleam as it fell upon customers approaching:  the prettiest little girl in the world, leading by the hand her baby brother, Mitchy-Mitch, coming to have Mitchy-Mitch’s hair clipped, against the heat.

It was a hot day and idle, with little to feed the mind—­and the barber was a mischievous man with an irritated nose.  He did his worst.

Meanwhile, the brooding Penrod pursued his homeward way; no great distance, but long enough for several one-sided conflicts with malign insulters made of thin air.  “You better not call me that!” he muttered.  “You just try it, and you’ll get what other people got when they tried it.  You better not ack fresh with me!  Oh, you will, will you?” He delivered a vicious kick full upon the shins of an iron fence-post, which suffered little, though Penrod instantly regretted his indiscretion.  “Oof!” he grunted, hopping; and went on after bestowing a look of awful hostility upon the fence-post.  “I guess you’ll know better next time,” he said, in parting, to this antagonist.  “You just let me catch you around here again and I’ll——­” His voice sank to inarticulate but ominous murmurings.  He was in a dangerous mood.

Nearing home, however, his belligerent spirit was diverted to happier interests by the discovery that some workmen had left a caldron of tar in the cross-street, close by his father’s stable.  He tested it, but found it inedible.  Also, as a substitute for professional chewing-gum it was unsatisfactory, being insufficiently boiled down and too thin, though of a pleasant, lukewarm temperature.  But it had an excess of one quality—­it was sticky.  It was the stickiest tar Penrod had ever used for any purposes whatsoever, and nothing upon which he wiped his hands served to rid them of it; neither his polka-dotted shirt waist nor his knickerbockers; neither the fence, nor even Duke, who came unthinkingly wagging out to greet him, and retired wiser.