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I remember one time when i was nine years old, i was running like a wild horse down a fresh-plowed furrow out in a field, and my inside right ankle came down on the long, sharp pointed end of a partially buried "lighterd-knot."
I don't remember any blood or any pain but by the time I reached the end of the row and climbed over the fence to the trail home, I could'nt walk. I had to get down and crawl the rest of the way, which was at least as far as a city block if not a little farther.
Well, later on that day it go so bad I had to be carried to town to the doctor which was about 20 miles away. We didn't have any sort of vehicle so we had to get a neighbor who happened to have a boy about my same age. He set up a fuss to go too, but they said no, and being something of a willful little fellow he sneaked out and hid in the rumble seat of their car and went anyway.
The doctor's office was upstairs over the City Drugstore on the corner down next to the river and when we got to the top of the stairs there was Edward the stow-away coming right on in behind us!
Well, they didn't have time to scold him too much right then, and not even time enough to pay much attention to what he was doing, because that little upstart stole a hyperdermic thing-a-ma-jig and nobody knew a thing about it.
I was the first one to learn about it. The first time I went down to the spring where mama always did the washing of clothes, there he was ...catching frogs, shooting them full of water with that hyperdermic thing, then dropping them back into the spring where they would sink to the bottom. And stay there. To die.
I'd never been so shocked by anything in my whole life! I yelled and screamed at him and tried my dead level best to make him stop it, but naturally he just laughed.
And I told on him.
I didn't care if I was a tattle tale this time. I'd tell or bust.
I absolutely had to make him stop being so cruel to those poor little helpless frogs!!!
And stop he did.
He had to stop because the grown-ups couldn't abide what he was doing either. They thought of something I had not. We got drinking water from that spring, and did our laundry in it's water, and I don't know what all, and they certainly didn't want a bunch of rotting dead frogs in it!
I still have the scar from that lighterd-knot on my ankle. I guess I also still have a little scar on my heart for those frogs. But I did finally stop holding that episode against him ___after all, he was only a little boy and had a lot to learn __same as me and everyone else! ~~~