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“Why did you come here then?” asked Toby coldly.

“It was Pop’s idea,” replied Tubb. “Aunt Sarah died last spring out in Michigan and she left Pop some money. The will said some of it was to go for my schooling. I wanted to go to Huckins’s, in Logansport. Know it? It’s an all-right school and two or three fellows from my town go there. It don’t cost much, either. But Pop was set on this dive. About ten years ago Pop was in partnership with a man named Mullins in the logging business, and this Mullins had a boy who went to school here. Pop thought a lot of the Mullinses, and when he learned about Aunt Sarah’s will he said right off I was to go here. He got the high school principal to coach me all summer. I kept telling him I wouldn’t like it here, kept telling him it wasn’t any place for a storekeeper’s son, but he wouldn’t listen. He said he’d lick the hide off me if I didn’t pass the examinations, and I knew he would. So I passed. He’ll lick me if I go back home, too, so I’ve got to go and get me a job somewhere. Guess I’ll enlist in the Navy. I’ll tell ’em I’m seventeen. They don’t care. I know a fellow got in when he was a couple of months younger than I am.”