Things sort of pottered along a day or two after we got back. Mostly Mark Tidd was spoiling a lot of paper with figures. I guess he figured in his sleep. He was so full of machine hours and board feet and labor costs and handling costs and such like that he hadn’t room in him for anything else but grub. You couldn’t fill him so full of anything but what he would still have room enough to stow away enough stuff to eat to astonish a hippopotamus.

When he wasn’t figuring he was asking questions, and every time he asked a question he had to figure some more; and then one day he got acquainted with a thing called “overhead expenses.” Well, you never saw such a muss as that kicked up. He said overhead meant the salaries of the superintendents and office force, and insurance, and taxes, and all that; and he said it made him do all his figures over again and add to his costs. I says to the other fellows that if Mark kept on raising his costs the folks that wanted to buy would have to take a balloon to get up to them. But Mark says there was no use selling unless you could sell at a profit. That sounded sensible even to me.

But Silas Doolittle didn’t understand it at all. I guess he figured that any money he got at all was profit. It didn’t matter what a thing cost, when he got real money for it, why, he was that much ahead. But he didn’t try to interfere, which was lucky for him. If anybody goes to interfering with Mark Tidd when Mark thinks he’s doing what he ought to do, then that person wants to go out and get an insurance policy against having something disagreeable and unexpected happen to him.

I asked Mark if he figured lead-pencils and paper in his overhead, because he was using up enough of them to support a couple of good-sized families. He said he was, and he said he was figuring me in as overhead, too. Not that I got a salary, but he let on it was a detriment to the business just to have me hanging around. I don’t think he really meant it, though you can’t ever tell. Maybe I was a detriment, but I was doing the best I knew how.

Saturday morning Mark he come over to me and says, “To-night’s the n-night, Plunk.”

“What night?” says I, because I had forgotten.

“Doll-cab and l-l-lullaby.”

I can’t write lullaby the way he stuttered it, and if I could I wouldn’t. It would waste almost as much paper as he did with his figuring. He put more than seven hunderd “l’s” into it.

“Huh!” says I, not much pleased about it, and who would be, I’d like to know?

“Say, Plunk,” says Mark, “I t-t-tell you what I’ll do. I’ll let you off this time. It’ll teach you not to bet. Bettin’s a m-m-mighty bad habit for a young f-f-feller like you.”

“An old man like you,” says I, sarcastic as vinegar, “is all right, though.”

“Sure,” says he, with a grin, “but I’ll let you off.”

“Would you ’a’ done what you agreed to if you lost the bet?”

“Yes,” says he.

“Then,” says I, “so will I. When I say I’ll do a thing, I’ll do it.”

He looked at me for a minute and then he just sort of touched me on the shoulder and says: “I might ’a’ knowed you’d say that. I’ve b-b-been in enough things with you to know you wasn’t a q-q-quitter. When I see you hikin’ around with that doll-cab to-night, hanged if I won’t be proud I know you.”

Yes, sir, he said that to me, and he said it like he meant it. Somehow after that I didn’t care who laughed at me when I was making an idiot of myself. I felt good. And right there I made up my mind to one thing: It’s a heap better to look like an idiot on account of keeping your word than it would be to look like a college perfessor by breaking it.

All the week that man Amassa P. Wiggamore had been hanging around town. As I said, he was the first man we saw when we got off the train from Bostwick. He didn’t come near us, though, but he spent a heap of time talking to folks, and Mark said he saw him coming out of the bank two or three times. Then we heard a rumor that the Power Company had bought up a lot of land up above town a few miles—farms that bordered on the river along the bluffs—and that it was planning to have a big storage reservoir there four or five miles long and a couple of miles wide, a regular lake. It was going to store water there during the spring freshets and the rainy season and then let it run down the river when the dry months come along and the river wasn’t anything but a trickle. It was to give an even flow of water the whole year around so he would have it to turn his turbine water-wheels and manufacture electricity.

“Um!” says Mark. “Looks to me like he was figurin’ on that l-l-lake comin’ about to us. L-looks like he was plannin’ to have his big dam right where our dam is.”

“How kin he?” says I.

“He can’t,” says Mark, and his jaw set so you would have thought he was biting something. “He can’t unless he pays our price for this mill.”

“If he can’t git this place, where else kin he build his dam?”

“I don’t know,” says Mark, “b-b-but I’m goin’ to f-f-find out.”

I didn’t feel very comfortable in my mind the rest of that day, thinking about what was going to happen to me at night, but all the same I was going to go through with it, and I says to myself that if any kid got too fresh when I was parading, I’d have something to say to him the next time I caught him. I hain’t much for fighting, but, all the same, I hain’t the kind to put up with more than I can stand. A good-natured fellow ought to fight about once a year just to show folks he hain’t too good-natured.

That night I waited till half past seven, and then I sneaked sister’s baby-cab and down-town I went. The band was just coming out of the Firemen’s Hall and forming a circle in the square when I got there. Mark and Tallow and Binney were sitting on the railing of the town pump, waiting, and I trundled past them without so much as looking. I pretended I didn’t see them at all, and pushed the cab right around the band. For a while nobody noticed me because the band was trying to get up steam. That’s the kind of a band we have.

Our band is what you could call home made. The cornet-player had some lessons, so they made him leader, but the rest of the fellows just bought horns and went out back of the barn where nobody could heave things at them, and learned. My! when they was learning but Wicksville was an unhealthy place early in the morning and at night. Everywhere you turned there was a fellow sitting with his eyes shut and his cheeks puffed out, trying to make a noise on a barytone or an alto or a trombone. Mostly for the first week they couldn’t make any noise at all, except now and then by accident, and that noise would be the worst kind of a blatt you ever heard. It got so bad, after a while, that the Town Board give orders nobody should practise on a horn in the corporate limits before five in the morning and after nine at night.

After a while most of them got so they could make different kinds of noises, but I dunno’s any of ’em ever got so’s they could tell ahead of time just what kind of a noise was coming out. The fellow with the big bass horn could go umph-ha, umph-ha, umph-ha over and over, but mostly it was the same umph-ha. He didn’t seem able to make different kinds. So, no matter what tune they was playing, he would go umph-haing along regardless. The altos had a kind of an easy time because there were four of them, and they sort of picked over their tunes. Each fellow found a note he could play and stuck to it, so that between them they got most of the notes in. Of that crowd—the altos—Deputy-Sheriff Whoppleham was about the best. He was tall and skinny, with a hooked beak and an Adam’s apple bigger than a Northern Spy. When he tooted his Adam’s apple woggled up and down like an elevator. He went at his horn like he planned to eat it. First he would lean his head ’way back and then tilt it sideways and shut one eye. Then he’d let her go. After every note he’d shut the eye he had open and open the eye he had shut. Sort of kept time that way, I guess.

The man that played the barytone was all messed up with whiskers, and it was a wonder how he ever piled his horn through them to find his mouth. He kept time with his right leg, working it like a horse with the spring-halts. But the leader he was the cream of the performance. He would woggle his horn up and down two or three times, and then make a special big woggle as a signal for the time to start. Then he would start keeping time for everybody by lifting first one foot, and then the other, like an elephant. Before a time was over he’d tramped up most of the space inside the band, and he felt pretty cheap if he didn’t get through the piece at least a minute ahead of everybody else. Then he’d look at them sort of superior and sarcastic and ask why in tunket they couldn’t keep the right time, with him beating it so plain.

Well, as I say, the band was trying to start in on a tune. They usually had to make three or four jumps at it before they decided just what they was going to do, and then maybe three or four of ’em would find they was playing the “Maiden’s Prayer” when the rest of them was playing “Star-spangled Banner.” Not that it made much difference that I could see. They all sounded alike, and there wasn’t one time that could scare a horse less than any other tune.

Pretty soon they got under way and was mowing the music down like anything, and folks sort of lost interest. Then a kid spied me, and he showed me to another kid, and he showed me to some more, and they pointed me out to everybody, and the trombone-player got his eye on me and sort of strangled and let out a strip of noise that sounded like a cow bellering to be milked. In about two minutes everybody saw me, but I never looked to right nor left, but went right along wheeling my doll-cab and singing a lullaby.

A crowd began to follow me around and make remarks, and perty soon old Mrs. Coots, that’s always messing in wherever anybody’s sick, came and stood right in front of me.

“Plunk Smalley,” says she, “what ails you? Be you out of your head?”

“No, ma’am,” says I, and tried to get past.

“He is,” says she to the crowd, “but a-course he don’t know it. Most likely he’s had some sort of a knock on the head, or maybe he’s comin’ down with gallopin’ typhoid. Here, you Plunk, lemme feel of your head.”

“I hain’t needin’ no medicine,” says I, for I seen her feeling in her reticule. Mostly she carried the meanest part of a drug-store in there, and just ached to give it to somebody. She was never so happy as when she was shoving some kind of medicine into a person that was worse to take than it was to have whatever disease was the matter with you.

I tried to dodge her, but she caught hold of me. I tried to jerk away, but she yells for somebody to help her, and about a dozen sprung forward to give a hand, well knowing that nothing was wrong with me, but having a mean desire to get in on a joke.

“Pore leetle feller!” she says to me. “Jest feel of his forehead. Like fire, that’s what it is. I’ll bet his temper’choor is more ’n a hunderd and fifty. We got to git him in bed quick, with some ice on his stummick, or maybe he’ll be passin’ away right on our hands.”

“Stummick!” says I. “Nothin’ the matter with my stummick.”

“It don’t matter,” says she. “I was readin’ in a book that you ought to pack folks in ice when they got fever. And it’s my experience that when a boy is sick it’s all due to his stummick; so we’ll just pack your stummick, Plunk. ’Twon’t be pleasant, but it’s for your good.”

I’ve noticed that most things that’s for your good is doggone unpleasant.

By this time there was a big crowd around, calling out things and laughing fit to split, and I’ll bet the band was mad as anything because nobody was paying any attention to them. Bands likes to have folks listen and admire them, I’ve took note. Maybe I could have broke away and run for it, but I’d made a promise and I was going to stick it out, so I looked up at Mrs. Coots and begun to sing a lullaby to my doll.

“Jest listen!” says she. “Hain’t it pitiful? Maybe it hain’t no disease,” says she, “but that he’s gone out of his head permanent. Come to think of it, I been afraid somethin’ like that would happen to him. He hain’t never acted quite right. I’ll bet he’s been crazy right along, only we hain’t took particular note. Crazy folks is sly,” says she. “How long you been wantin’ to parade around with a doll and sing to it, Plunk?”

“I never wanted to,” says I, “but I got to.”

“See that?” she says to everybody. “He can’t help it. I ’spect he realizes he hain’t sane and tries to act sane, but can’t manage it. Hain’t it a shame, and him so young! Jest think of him bein’ shut up in an asylum from his age. Maybe he’ll live to be ninety like Clem Adams’s second wife’s cousin, that thought she was a cook-stove and used to go around tryin’ to fry onions in a pan on her head.”

“Lemme go,” says I, “’fore I git violent.”

“Violent!” says she, as satisfied as a purring cat. “I calc’late he’ll be dangerous. I’ll bet right now he’s figgerin’ on doin’ somebody a damage.”

“I be,” says I.

Just then Mark Tidd came through the crowd, looking as grave as a pelican, only fatter. “Mrs. Coots,” says he, “l-lemme try to manage the poor f-f-feller. He knows me well,” says he, “and I guess I kin g-git him away ’fore he hurts anybody. You got to humor sich cases,” says he.

“He might maul you,” says she.

“I hain’t afraid,” says he; “jest leggo and give me a t-t-try.”

So she let go, and Mark takes me by the arm and says: “Plunk, this is Mark Tidd. D’you know me?”

“You bet I know you,” says I.

“There,” says he to Mrs. Coots; “he knows me.”

“He’s lookin’ at you perty mean,” says she.

“I calc’late he feels some het up,” says Mark. “Now, Plunk,” he says, “I know how you f-f-feel. You feel like that baby ought to hear the b-band and git some cool air, don’t you? Well, you’re right. Yes, sir. But hain’t you scairt that maybe she’ll catch c-c-cold?”

“Somebody’ll catch somethin’,” says I.

“I t-t-tell you what,” says he, “if I was you I’d git that baby indoors and put her to b-b-bed. She’ll be gettin’ mumps or somethin’ if you drag her around in the night air. You jest take a walk with me and we’ll put her to bed. Hain’t that best?”

“Somebody’s goin’ to be put to bed,” says I, “but it won’t be with mumps.”

He sort of chuckled. “Plunk,” says he, in a whisper, “we got to git out of here. That man Wiggamore’s just gone off up the street with Jason Barnes that owns the land next above our m-m-mill, and we got to f-f-find out what they’re talkin’ about, if we kin.” Then he says, out loud, “Now come along like a s-s-sensible father,” says he. “Come on.”

I started along with him, and the crowd hooted and laughed, but Mrs. Coots was as serious as ever and tagged along with us.

“I got to see him shut up,” she says. “Runnin’ at large he’s a danger to the community.”

“Scoot!” says Mark, and he give me a little shove.

You can believe I scooted. If you ever tried to run pushing a doll-cart in front of you, you know what a time I had. The thing kept wabbling and trying to go off sideways. Seemed like it was alive. But I made good time. I don’t reckon Mrs. Coots could have caught me if she was riding on a race-horse.

I made tracks for the Baptist church, and jumped into a dark corner and stood still. Pretty soon Mark came lumbering past and I called to him. He stopped.

“She’s give up the c-c-chase,” says he; “and now l-let’s git after Wiggamore. He’s got quite a start.”

“I’m willin’,” says I. “But I’m goin’ to git even with Mrs. Coots or bust.”