The Wicksville paper told how there wouldn’t be any school for six weeks, on account of somebody getting diphtheria. That same afternoon my father didn’t get out of the way of an automobile and got broke inside some place, so he had to go to the hospital in Detroit to have it fixed.

“James,” says my mother—that’s my real name, but the fellows call me Plunk—“I’ve—I’ve got to go with—your father.” She was crying, you see, and I wasn’t feeling very good, I can tell you. “And,” she went on, “I don’t know what—we shall ever do.”

“About what?” I asked her, having no idea myself.

“The store,” she says.

I saw right off. You see, my father is Mr. Smalley, and he owns Smalley’s Bazar, where you can buy almost anything—if father can find where he put it. With father gone and mother gone there wouldn’t be anybody left to look after the store, and so there wouldn’t be any money, because the store was where money came from, and then as sure as shooting the Smalley family would have a hard time of it. It made me gloomier than ever, especially because I didn’t seem to be able to think of any way to help.

Mother went up-stairs to father’s room, shaking her head and crying, and I went outdoors because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. I opened the door and stepped out on the porch, and right that minute I began to feel easier in my mind, somehow. The thing that did it was just seeing who was sitting there, almost filling up a whole step from side to side. It was a boy, and he was so fat his coat was ’most busted in the back where he bulged, and his name was Mark Tidd. That’s short for Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd, and you maybe have heard of him on account of the stories Tallow Martin and Binney Jenks have told about him. Yes, sir, the sight of him made me feel a heap better.

“Hello, P-plunk!” he stuttered. “How’s your f-f-father?”

“Got to go to the hospital,” says I, “and mother’s goin’, too, and there won’t be anybody to mind the store, and there won’t be any money, and we don’t know what we’re a-goin’ to do.” I was ’most cryin’, but I didn’t let on any more than I could help.

“W-what’s that?” asks Mark.

I told him all over again, and he squinted up his little eyes and began pinching his fat cheek like he does when he’s studying hard over something.

“L-looks bad, don’t it?” he says.

“Awful,” says I.

“M-must be some way out,” he says, which was just like him. He never bothered fussing about how bad things looked. As soon as they began looking bad he started in to find some way of fixing them up so they’d be better. Always. He kept on thinking and then he turned to me, and I saw right off he’d seen something to do.

“N-no school for six weeks,” says he.

“I know,” I says, not seeing what that had to do with it.

“G-gives you and me and T-tallow and Binney all the t-time to ourselves,” says he.

“Sure,” says I, not seeing yet.

He wrinkled his pudgy nose sort of disgusted at me.

“D-don’t you figger,” says he, “that four b-boys is ’most equal to one m-m-man?”

“Maybe,” says I.

“Even if the man is your f-f-father?”

Then I saw it, and it sort of scared me. It looked to me like a bigger job than Mark ever tackled yet.

“You don’t mean for us boys to run the store?” I says.

“Sure,” says he.

“But runnin’ a store’s business,” says I.

“B-b-business,” says Mark, “hain’t nothin’ but makin’ m-money out of somethin’ you like to do. P-poor business men is them that tries to make money out of somethin’ they d-don’t like to do.”

“Um,” says I.

“We’ll enjoy runnin’ the Bazar,” says he, as if the whole thing was settled.

“I’m afraid,” says I. “S’pose we was to bust the business.”

“We won’t,” says he. “L-let’s talk to your ma about it.”

We went in, and after a while my mother came down-stairs. I felt sort of foolish when I told her Mark’s idea, and it didn’t get any better when she said, “Bosh!”

But I was forgetting about Mark. He started in to talk to mother, and he spluttered and stuttered along for fifteen minutes, arguing and wiggling his stumpy fingers, and explaining to her how easy running a bazar was, and just why he and Tallow and Binney and I were a lot better able to do it than anybody else on the face of the earth. Why, I began to believe him myself! So did mother. Mark knew just how to go at it. At the start, when she didn’t want to listen, he talked so fast she couldn’t find a chance to tell him to keep quiet, and by the time he was beginning to slacken up mother was bobbing her head and almost smiling, and saying, “Yes, yes,” and, “Do you honestly think you could?” and, “I don’t see why I didn’t think of it myself,” and things like that.

“Why,” says Mark, “you d-d-don’t need to worry about the Bazar a minute. Just look after Mr. Smalley.”

“I wish I could ask your father’s advice,” mother said to me, finally, “but I daren’t. I’ll just have to decide myself. And it seems like there wasn’t but one way to decide. I won’t say a word to father about it.... You can try, boys ... and it will be a—miracle—a blessed miracle if it—comes out all right.” Then she started to cry again.

Mark, he waddled over and patted her on the back and says, soothing-like, “Jest you t-t-trust me, Mrs. Smalley—and don’t worry—not a mite.”

It ended up by mother giving me the keys to the Bazar, and kissing me and Mark, and telling us she was proud of us, and—hurrying out of the room so we couldn’t see her cry any more.

Mark looked at me and scowled. “Looky there, now,” he says. “Looky there. Guess we g-g-got to make a go of it. Calc’late she’s got trouble enough without us makin’ it worse.... C-come on.”

We went out and found Binney and Tallow. At first they wouldn’t believe us when we told them, but when they did believe they set up a whoop like somebody’d up and given them a dollar to spend for peanuts. Anybody’d think running a bazar was some kind of a circus, which it isn’t at all, because I’ve worked for dad holidays and Saturdays sometimes, and I know.

“When do we start?” asks Tallow.

“F-f-first thing in the mornin’,” says Mark.

“When they goin’ to take your father?” Binney asks me.

“On the five-forty to-night,” I told him, “and I guess I’ll be goin’ home to see if there hain’t somethin’ I can help with.”

“Where you goin’, Mark?”

“Home, too. I got consid’able th-thinkin’ to do. How’d you expect me to m-make money with this business if I don’t study it some?”

Anybody’d ’a’ thought it was his business, to hear him talk, and I guess he’d already begun thinking it was. No matter what he tackled, he was just that way. Every time he set his heart on doing something, whether it was for himself or for somebody else, he went at it like he owned the whole shebang and had to come out on top or get dragged off to the poorhouse.

I started to walk off, but Mark called after me:

“B-b-better gimme those keys. I’ll be down ’fore you are in the mornin’, and maybe I’ll have to go down to-night.”

Well, sir, I handed over the keys and didn’t say a word. I could see who was going to be the head of that business while dad was gone, and that feller’s name wasn’t Plunk Smalley.

“I hope,” says I, after thinking it over a minute, “that you’ll at least give me a job.”

“Huh!” snorts Mark. “If you don’t git wider awake than you usually be I dun’no’s the business can afford to h-have you around.” But right after that he grinned, and when Mark Tidd grins nobody can be mad with him or envy him or think he is bossing the job more than he ought to.

“T-tell your mother not to worry,” he yelled after me.

It was possible for mother to go with father and leave me at home because Aunt Minnie was there. Aunt Minnie was my father’s sister, and she lived with us because if she hadn’t she would have had to live alone, and she couldn’t live alone because she was afraid. One day I started to count up the things Aunt Minnie was afraid of, but it wasn’t any use. I guess if she was to set out and try she could be afraid of anything. She was afraid of pigs, and of thunder, and of tramps, and of bumblebees, and of the dark, and of sun-stroke, and of book agents, and of— Why, once she lay awake all night and shivered on account of a red-flannel undershirt hanging on the line. I’d rather have stayed at Mark’s house or somewheres than with her, but it wasn’t any use. There’s no fun staying with a woman that’s all the time squealing and squinching and jumping like somebody shoved a pin into her.

That night, after father and mother were gone, Aunt Minnie wouldn’t let me go out of the house, because, says she, like as not burglars have been watching for just such a chance for years, hanging around Wicksville, waiting for this house to be left with nobody but her in it. It didn’t seem to me like it would be worth a burglar’s time to wait many years for a chance at what was in our house. But you couldn’t reason with Aunt Minnie, so I had to sit in the house right when I wanted to see Mark Tidd the worst kind of way.

Along about half past eight there come a rap at the door, and Aunt Minnie let out a yell that startled me so I was close to seeing burglars myself. It wasn’t, though; it was Mark.

“Come in,” I says to him. “I’m pretty busy keepin’ out robbers, but I guess I can find a minute to talk with you.”

He just grinned, because he knew Aunt Minnie.

“I’ve b-been down to the store,” says he.

“Oh!” says I.

“Just lookin’ around,” says he, “to g-git an idee.”

“Did you git one?” says I.

“I did,” says he. “I got the idee that n-n-nobody could find what he was lookin’ for in that Bazar ’less he did it by accident.”

“Pa used to have that trouble,” says I. And it was a fact. I’ve known pa to spend the whole morning looking for a spool of darning-cotton—hours after the customer that wanted it had got tired and gone home. But pa never got provoked about it; he always kept on till he found it, and then put it handy. Next day if somebody come in for a brush-broom that pa couldn’t find, he’d try to sell them the darning-cotton instead. Old Ike Bond, the ’bus-driver, used to say that if pa didn’t have anything to sell but one spool of thread, and that was hanging by a string in the middle of the store, he never would find it without the sheriff and a search-warrant.

“F-first thing for us to do,” says Mark, “is to f-find everything. Got to know what we got to sell ’fore we can sell it.”

That sounded likely to me.

“And,” says he, “we got to hustle.”

“Why?” says I.

“To get a head start,” says he.

“A head start of what?”

“The other bazar,” says he.

I grinned because I thought he was joking, and said to git out, because there wasn’t any other bazar.

“Worse’n a bazar,” says he. “It’s one of those five-and-ten-cent stores.”

“Be you crazy?” I says.

“They’ve rented that vacant s-s-store of Jenkins’s, and there’s a big sign sayin’ they’ll be open for b-business Monday.”

Well, sir, I was what Aunt Minnie calls flabbergasted. Why, Wicksville wasn’t big enough for two bazars—it was hard enough for one to make a living.

“I—I hope it’s a mistake,” says I.

“Oh, I dun’no’,” says Mark, sort of squinting up his little eyes. “I g-guess we’ll git along somehow—and it’ll be more fun.”

“Fun?” I says.

“Fun,” says he. “Hain’t it more f-f-fun to play a ball game against another team than it is to bounce a ball against the side of the house all alone?”

Now, wasn’t that just like him! If a thing was easy he didn’t take any interest in it, but just the minute you put some kind of a contest into it, then Mark couldn’t start in fast enough.

“Maybe it’ll be fun for you,” I told him, “but what about the Smalley family that expects that Bazar to pay for what they eat?”

“Plunk,” says Mark, “don’t git licked before the f-f-fight begins.”

“We can’t sell as cheap as those five-and-ten-cent stores. I’ve heard pa say so.”

“I hain’t so s-sure,” says Mark. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.... You be d-down to the store at seven o’clock,” says he, and waddled off home.

Now, wouldn’t anybody think it was his store? Wouldn’t they? It looked to me like he was trying to be the whole thing, but you can bet I didn’t feel that way before we were through with it. I was all-fired glad Mark Tidd was around with his schemes and his plans and his way of running everything in general.