"Yes, that's what he said. And poor Clay Wright Benton was in here, too, and I spoke to him about them, too, and he said that you could, too."
"My!" Mrs. Wiley's tone was appalled. "Did Clay seem frightened? I suppose they aren't afraid of anything,—they've got the parrot, you know."
"I don't know how that would help them. It hangs upside down, yelling 'Fire, Fire,' rainy days, until nobody can possibly think it means it."
"Well, but it wouldn't make any difference what it said, would it, if it woke them?"
"But they're so tired being woke, it can't wake 'em any more. Clay says nothing wakes 'em now. Even Gran'ma Benton falls asleep while it's calling her names."
"Dear me," said Mrs. Wiley, seriously. "I wouldn't care about having one for myself. I never let the children call names, and I just couldn't be called names by a parrot."
"Clay says his mother don't like it. She's tried to teach it Bible verses. But names are so much easier. Bible verses are so long. And they don't come in where they make sense. The short ones are worse yet. There's 'Jesus wept'—that's the shortest verse in the Bible, and that never would make sense. The parrot says 'Twenty-three,' and that always makes sense. This world is meant to go wrong, seems to me. Case-knives just swim along without paying board, while an honest woman has to scrub her church once a week on her knees and labor like a heathen Chinese in between times."
"Well, Mrs. Ray, what are we coming to?"
"I told Edward Griggs what Nathan said, but Edward thinks they're government spies sent out to keep track of the surveyors, and they have the knives to dig with."
"To dig with!" Mrs. Wiley was full of amazement.