Mary Emma & Company Read Online Free PDF Page A

another word.
    I didn’t have a bit of trouble in class; my teacher was a good one, the reading was easy, and the arithmetic problems were in quarters and eighths instead of thirteenths. But at recess time I didn’t get along very well. It all started over my hat. We hadn’t been out in the yard two minutes before some one of the boys knocked it off. Then, as fast as I could pick it up, brush it off, and put it on again, some other boy knocked it off. In Colorado I’d have tried to lick the first boy who did it, but in Medford there were two reasons why I didn’t dare. Mother always meant it when she said she wouldn’t tolerate anything, and besides, Mr. Jackman was out there in the school yard with us. I knew he couldn’t have helped seeing what was going on, and I was sure he’d stop the boys as soon as he saw that I wasn’t going to fight—but he didn’t.
    About the tenth time my hat got knocked off the folded paper I kept inside the sweat band came out. Of course, that made it a size too big for my head, and the next boy jerked it down over my face so hard I was afraid he’d tear the brim. Before I straightened it out and put it back on I looked all around and said, “The next one that touches my hat is going to get poked in the nose.”
    Al Richardson was the one who did it, and so quick that I didn’t have a chance to get my fists doubled up before the hat brim was jerked clear down to my chin. To make it worse, the sweat band caught on my nose when I tried to pull the hat up, and I had to stand there like a cat trying to get its head out of a salmon can while all the boys laughed at me. That would have made me mad enough but, on top of it, I could hear Mr. Jackman laughing, too. His voice was high, like a woman’s, and his laugh was almost a squeal.
    I don’t know whether I made my nose bleed when I finally managed to yank the hat off, or whether Al did it. It could have been either one, because there was only a second from the time I got my hat off until we were fighting. I could punch twice as hard as Al, but he could hit twice as fast, and he could duck quicker than the bobber on a trout line. That was what got me into my first big trouble in Medford: Al ducked, but Mr. Jackman didn’t.
    He must have come to pull us apart just as I started a haymaker, and he must have been bending over, because my left fist caught him square in the right eye. For what seemed to me like ten minutes he just stood there rubbing his eye, as if he couldn’t believe what had happened to him. I told him that I didn’t mean to do it and was sorry, but he grabbed me by the shoulders of my coat and shook me until I thought my teeth would rattle loose. After he’d stopped he told me, between pantings, to march right back to my room, and that I’d have no more recesses until I’d learned to be civilized.

    I felt real bad about it until recess was over and Al Richardson came back to class. He sat right across the aisle from me, and he had a good big lump on his cheekbone, but he wasn’t sore about it. As soon as Miss Bradley turned her back to draw a map on the blackboard, he leaned over and whispered, “You can sock pretty hard, but I’ll bet I can lick you. After school, if we get a chance?”
    I didn’t want to get caught whispering on top of everything else, so I just nodded, but we didn’t have any fight after school. Al Richardson and Allie Dion walked all the way to the D & H Grocery with me, and all they wanted to do was to have me tell them about Colorado and cowboys and ranches and riding in roundups, and things like that.
    That afternoon I was so busy at the grocery store that I forgot all about having had a fight at school, and I only had spare time enough to eat two pieces of candy and a cookie. Quite a few of the families that lived over near the brickyards and the clay pits were poor, and they bought their coal from