his shaving, Cy piped, “Naw, you got to give us two dollars,” and he got it.  A week later Cy rigged a tic-tac to a window of the living-room, and the tattoo out of the darkness frightened Carol into screaming.  Since then, in four months, she had beheld Cy hanging a cat, stealing melons, throwing tomatoes at the Kennicott house, and making ski-tracks across the lawn, and had heard him explaining the mysteries of generation, with great audibility and dismaying knowledge.  He was, in fact, a museum specimen of what a small town, a well-disciplined public school, a tradition of hearty humor, and a pious mother could produce from the material of a courageous and ingenious mind.

Carol was afraid of him.  Far from protesting when he set his mongrel on a kitten, she worked hard at not seeing him.

The Kennicott garage was a shed littered with paint-cans, tools, a lawn-mower, and ancient wisps of hay.  Above it was a loft which Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock, young brother of Harry, used as a den, for smoking, hiding from whippings, and planning secret societies.  They climbed to it by a ladder on the alley side of the shed.

This morning of late January, two or three weeks after Vida’s revelations, Carol had gone into the stable-garage to find a hammer.  Snow softened her step.  She heard voices in the loft above her: 

“Ah gee, lez—­oh, lez go down the lake and swipe some mushrats out of somebody’s traps,” Cy was yawning.

“And get our ears beat off!” grumbled Earl Haydock.

“Gosh, these cigarettes are dandy.  ’Member when we were just kids, and used to smoke corn-silk and hayseed?”

“Yup.  Gosh!”

Spit.  “Silence.”

“Say Earl, ma says if you chew tobacco you get consumption.”

“Aw rats, your old lady is a crank.”

“Yuh, that’s so.”  Pause.  “But she says she knows a fella that did.”

“Aw, gee whiz, didn’t Doc Kennicott used to chew tobacco all the time before he married this-here girl from the Cities?  He used to spit—–­Gee!  Some shot!  He could hit a tree ten feet off.”

This was news to the girl from the Cities.

“Say, how is she?” continued Earl.

“Huh?  How’s who?”

“You know who I mean, smarty.”

A tussle, a thumping of loose boards, silence, weary narration from Cy: 

“Mrs. Kennicott?  Oh, she’s all right, I guess.”  Relief to Carol, below.  “She gimme a hunk o’ cake, one time.  But Ma says she’s stuck-up as hell.  Ma’s always talking about her.  Ma says if Mrs. Kennicott thought as much about the doc as she does about her clothes, the doc wouldn’t look so peaked.”

Spit.  Silence.

“Yuh.  Juanita’s always talking about her, too,” from Earl.  “She says Mrs. Kennicott thinks she knows it all.  Juanita says she has to laugh till she almost busts every time she sees Mrs. Kennicott peerading along the street with that ‘take a look—­I’m a swell skirt’ way she’s got.  But gosh, I don’t pay no attention to Juanita.  She’s meaner ’n a crab.”