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Studs laughed, but he couldn’t keep his mind off that trouble at home. Anyway, the cat was out now. That was a relief. The worst that could come would be better than having that dark cloud of fear always hanging over him. The old man would probably cool off. He’d said plenty already about it being dishonorable. And the old lady had cried and babbled that they were disgraced, and that she’d never again be able to hold her head up, and that they’d have to move out of the neighborhood, because she could never again face the neighbors and parishioners. And Fran sticking her nose in too, as if it was her business. If she wasn’t his sister, he’d kick her teeth in for her. And when he’d said he never wanted to go to school, and that he’d told them so that night he’d graduated, that hadn’t meant anything. It was always the same. They all acted as if they were always right.

The punks argued shrilly. He laughed, forgetting his own troubles. Fat Malloy jumped up from his trench and yelled in his bullying loud-mouthed way:

“All right, you birds! Play square. We said the side that lost the toss-up had to be the Germans. And who lost? Tell me that! Who lost?... If we lost we’d have been the Germans. Play square.”

“You guys ain’t got any sportsmanship,” Young Horn Buck-ford said, wiping his nose with his sleeve.

“You cheated in that toss-up, and we won’t be no Germans,” Andy yelled.

“If you guys was patriots you’d want to be the Germans anyway because you’re getting licked. You wouldn’t want the Americans to be licked,” yelled O’Neill in a loud, squeaking voice.

“Come on over and try and make us be the Germans,” yelled Andy.

They drove him under cover with tin cans. In the midst of the battle, he popped up and shouted:

“You guys would cheat your own mother.”

Young Horn tried to rearrange the battered earthworks in front of his trench. O’Neill hit him in the shoulder.

“Hurrah for us Americans!” yelled Andy, again jumping up and down, and laughing like an idiot.

“Hey, Le Gare, watch out for the squirrels,” Studs shouted.

No one heard him. The punks didn’t even seem to know that the great and tough Studs Lonigan was watching them.

Studs was keen to join in the battle. He couldn’t play punk games any more. He wished that Red and Paulie Haggerty and some of the guys would come along. Then they could all get in, and that would be different. It wouldn’t be just him, alone, playing. Or else the bunch of them could bust the game up, and that would be fun, all of them kicking in the trenches, and when the punks got loud-mouthed, booting their tails around the block.

O’Neill crawled out from the reserve trench, and yelled that he was wounded and couldn’t be hit. He went over by the side fence of the prairie, walked past the baby-buggy where Young Horn had left his baby brother, and came out on the sidewalk, as the battle continued.

“Hey, goof!” yelled Studs.

O’Neill came over to Studs like one in his sleep.

“Where you going?”

“Hospital,” said O’Neill, showing a hand bleeding slightly from a scratch.

Studs shook his head quizzically, as he watched O’Neill enter Levin’s drug store across the street. But he itched to get into it, or else break it up. He looked at his long pants. He stuck his hands in his pockets, and stood sneering.

Well, before the war was over, he’d be in it, and get the real stuff. And suppose he did get killed. All right, it would make him one of his country’s heroes, along with those who’d died in the other wars to make America the great land that it was. And it would only serve his old man right.

Screwy McGlynn, the laundry driver, hopped from his wagon and joined Studs.

“That’s why this country’s great. These kids exemplify the unconquerable American spirit. They show in their way why this country can lick the world, and why our boys aren’t going to stop, once they get started, until they march straight into Berlin,” philosophized Screwy.

Studs assumed a mature man-to-man attitude, and nodded.