Here, there, and everywhere, overturned benches and chairs and scattered tools, and scraping, struggling footprints on the dusty floor told of some recent and desperate battle. Something warm and wet was sprinkled all about the place, at touch of which Fred grew sick and faint; but not another sign was there of old Wallace or of Jim, until from under a blazing, half-finished car some fifty feet away the firemen dragged a battered, bleeding form, and the younger brother threw himself by the senseless elder's side, madly imploring him to say what had befallen father.
[1] Begun in HARPER'S ROUND TABLE No. 821.
Arthur Clark believed himself the victim of gross injustice. His bicycle had brought him into disgrace. He had come home flushed with victory, ready to be hailed as the uncrowned king of scorchers, and here he was virtually a prisoner in his room, thither he had been sent directly after a wretched supper of oatmeal porridge.
"I wouldn't mind it if I had been ordered not to go into the road race," he said to himself, for the fiftieth time, as he rolled impatiently in his bed; "but just because I promised my father I wouldn't do any riding that would exhaust me, he has packed me off to bed as if I were a mere child. That's pretty rough on a fellow of fourteen. Anyhow, I beat all the scorchers in our school, and that's something."
Arthur could not go to sleep. He twisted and squirmed from one side of the bed to the other, listening to the solemn protests of the katydids and the shrill chirping of the crickets. That industrious prompter, conscience, began to annoy him shamelessly. Now that the first flush of his resentment had died away, he thought that perhaps his father was right after all. True, he had beaten all the other fellows easily; but then, what if it had been a hard struggle? Wouldn't it have exhausted him? It occurred to him that he had broken his word.
Arthur fell asleep very late. He usually slept so fast and so hard that from bedtime until the rising bell seemed like one minute. But now he tossed restlessly. His sleep was light. Suddenly he found himself sitting bolt-upright in bed. He saw a streak of pale whitish light on the floor and across his bed, and caught a glimpse of the moon. Oh, yes, it was the moon that had awakened him. Queer that had never happened before. He would go to sleep again. Then a rough, rather hoarse voice startled him. It came from his father's room.