possible. In the little Buttons his experience as scapegoat taught
him to take but little interest. From his earliest memories they
were the first to be fed, clothed and bedded; to his own share fell
the exiguous scraps. As they were much younger than himself, he
found no pleasure in their companionship. For society he sought such
of the youth of Budge Street as would admit him into their raucous
fellowship. But, for some reason which his immature mind could not
fathom, he felt a pariah even among his coevals. He could run as
fast as Billy Goodge, the undisputed leader of the gang; he could
dribble the rag football past him any time he desired; once he had
sent him home to his mother with a bleeding nose, and, even in that
hour of triumph, popular sympathy had been with Billy, not with him.
It was the only problem in existence to which his fatalism did not
supply the key. He knew himself to be a better man than Billy
Goodge. There was no doubt about it. At school, where Billy was the
woodenest blockhead, he was top of his class. He knew things about
troy weight and geography and Isaac and the Mariners of England of
which Billy did not dream. To Billy the football news in the
Saturday afternoon edition of The Bludston Herald was a cryptogram;
to him it was an open book. He would stand, acknowledged scholar, at
the street corner and read out from the soiled copy retrieved by
Chunky, the newsboy, the enthralling story of the football day,
never stumbling over a syllable, athrill with the joy of being the
umbilicus of a tense world, and, when the recital was over, he would
have the mortification of seeing the throng pass away from him with
the remorselessness of a cloud scudding from the moon. And he would
hear Billy Goodge say exultantly:

"Didn't Aw tell yo' the Wolves hadn't a dog's chance?"