These broodings helped a little; but it was a severe morning, and on his way home at noon he did not recover heart enough to practice the bullfrog's croak, the craft that Sam Williams had lately mastered to inspiring perfection. This sonorous accomplishment Penrod had determined to make his own. At once guttural and resonant, impudent yet plaintive, with a barbaric twang like the plucked string of a Congo war-fiddle, the sound had fascinated him. It is made in the throat by processes utterly impossible to describe in human words, and no alphabet as yet produced by civilized man affords the symbols to vocalize it to the ear of imagination. "Gunk" is the poor makeshift that must be employed to indicate it.
Penrod uttered one half-hearted "Gunk" as he turned in at his own gate. However, this stimulated him, and he paused to practice.
"Gunk!" he croaked. "Gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk!"
Mrs. Schofield leaned out of an open window upstairs.
"Don't do that, Penrod," she said anxiously. "Please don't do that."
"Why not?" Penrod asked, and, feeling encouraged by his progress in the new art, he continued: "Gunk--gunk-gunk! Gunk-gunk--"
"Please try not to do it," she urged pleadingly. "You CAN stop it if you try. Won't you, dear?"
But Penrod felt that he was almost upon the point of attaining a mastery equal to Sam Williams's. He had just managed to do something in his throat that he had never done before, and he felt that unless he kept on doing it at this time, his new-born facility might evade him later. "Gunk!" he croaked. "Gunk--gunk- gunk!" And he continued to croak, persevering monotonously, his expression indicating the depth of his preoccupation.
His mother looked down solicitously, murmured in a melancholy undertone, shook her head; then disappeared from the window, and, after a moment or two, opened the front door.
"Come in, dear," she said; "I've got something for you."
Penrod's look of preoccupation vanished; he brightened and ceased to croak. His mother had already given him a small leather pocketbook with a nickel in it, as a souvenir of her journey.