I don't know--mebbe I haven't taken just the right tack with him yet." Winona thought him curiously evasive in manner.

She believed that he feared the worst for the boy, but was concealing it from her.
"His eye is almost well where that cowardly bully struck him," she told Sharon.

"If only we could get him into something where he could hold his head up." "He does that too much now," began Sharon, impulsively, but stopped, floundering.

"I mean he ain't enough ashamed," he concluded feebly, and feigned that someone had called him imperatively from the door of the First National Bank.
From time to time Spike's boxing manner grew tense for a period of days.
He tightened up, as Sharon put it, and left a sore and battered apprentice while he went off to some distant larger town to fight, stepping nonchalantly aboard the six-fifty-eight with his fighting trunks and shoes wrapped in a copy of the Newbern _Advance_, and shifting his gum as he said good-bye to Wilbur, who would come down to see him off.
Sometimes Spike returned from these sorties unscathed and with money.
Oftener he came back without money and with a face--from abrasive thrusts--looking as if a careless golfer had gone over him and neglected to replace the divots.

After these times there were likely to follow complicated episodes of dentistry at the office of Doctor Patten.