when neighbors, Mr. Radley orAtticus appeared. And they earned puzzled looks from Miss Maudie while she cut her hedge. However, one day they are so caught up in what they are doing that they don't notice Atticus standing to the side, smacking his newspaper against his leg.

When Atticus questions what they are doing, Jem denies everything. Atticus asks if it has anything to do with the Radleys, and Jem denies this also. Atticus' warning that it had better not is very clear. He takes the scissors and returns them to the house.

The boys want to continue their game, but Scout does not because the day they played the tire game and she rolled into the side of the Radley house, she heard laughter coming from inside.

So Jem is a born hero (in Scout's mind) because of the wonderful way he weaves a story and his ability to fill in the gaps where information is missing. Perhaps she is also impressed that Jem keeps his head when Atticus confronts him about their activities.

Scout seemed to enjoy playing the Boo Radley game much less than Jem and Dill. She claims to have preferred playing their previous Tarzan game to their new one. It was probably in part because Scout's roles were not as exciting as Dill's (Mr. Radley) or Jem's (Boo). Scout usually played the part of Mrs. Radley, but she also played other "assorted ladies who entered the script." But the main reason was her trepidation about being so close to Boo. However, Jem assured Scout that he would protect her, and he reminded her that Calpurnia was also home during the day and Atticus was always home at night. Those reassurances, in Scout's mind, made Jem "a born hero."

Early in Harper Lee's coming-of-age novel in the American South during the 1930s, readers are introduced to the main characters. The novel's narrator is six-year-old Jean Louis "Scout" Finch. Her brother, Jem, is three years older--a considerable margin at that period of life. And, while Jem and Scout do not always get along, as will be seen in Chapter 14, when Scout physically attacks her brother out of anger at being bossed around by Aunt Alexandra and by Jem, she does look up to him as an older, wiser figure. Despite that later explosion of violence between Scout and Jem, the young girl clearly respects her older brother, and is accustomed to listening to him in manners of personal conduct.

Early in Chapter 4, Scout describes passing the Radley house, which figures prominently in Lee's narrative, but detouring onto the Radley property to extract a small, shiny item from the hole in a tree trunk. What she finds is chewing gum, which she innocently begins to chew. Her brother's reaction is described in the following passage: "Jem came home and wondered where I got the gum. I finally told him that I found it in the Radley’s tree. Jem yells, 'Spit it out right now! Don’t you know you’re not supposed to even touch the trees over there? You’ll get killed if you do!' and I obeyed." So, it is established that Jem is an important figure in Scout's life, not just as a sibling, but as an older, more experienced (all things being relative) figure of some measure of authority--an image bolstered by Jem, and Dill's, repeated efforts at drawing out the reclusive Boo Radley.

The Radley house and the repeated efforts at taunting or drawing out Boo would allow for additional instances of bravery on the part of Jem, as when he is forced to sneak out of his bedroom late at night to retrieve his pants from the fence where they had gotten snagged earlier in the day. As Scout describes her emotions: "I was scared to let Jem go back there alone in the middle of the night, but he went anyway. After a while, he came back and crept into bed. Thank goodness!" While Jem would certainly display a variety of emotions during the course of the story, including fear, anger and sadness, he was still Scout's big brother, and a figure upon whom the young girl could count. Perhaps that was why, in the context of Scout, Jem and Dill's game of pretending to be the Radleys, Scout would observe, "Jem was a born hero."

The children's game required each of them to portray multiple figures from their lives, but Jem was always a figure of authority who would display attributes he would exhibit 'for real' in the book's closing passages. Bob Ewell's attack on Jem and Scout provided an opportunity for the by-now 13-year-old boy to attempt to protect his younger sister. That he would suffer a broken arm and be rendered unconscious, with Boo Radley revealed as the hero of the night, did not diminish Jem's heroism in the eyes of his sister.