“Huh!” grunted Mistah Mule, who—when he wasn’t ill—was always ready to disagree with anybody, about anything. “You-all ain’t so slow as what I is.”
Bright and Broad looked at each other and shook their heads. Then they burst into a rumbling laugh: “Ho! Ho! Ho!”
“What for you scoffin’ at me?” Mistah Mule demanded.
“We’ve seen you run,” they told him. “You’re fast.”
“Prehaps! Prehaps!” Mistah Mule admitted. “But I kin be so slow, when I wants to be, that I doesn’t move a-tall.”
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” Again the great sides of Bright and Broad heaved with laughter. “We know you’re sometimes balky. But it’s easy to balk. A rock or a tree can do that. The question is, how slowly can you walk and not come to a halt?”
“Slower’n what you-all kin!” Mistah Mule retorted.
“Ho! Ho! Ho! Pardon us! But we don’t think so,” Bright and Broad replied. Bright winked very slowly at Broad; and Broad winked very slowly at Bright.
Now, Mistah Mule was all for settling the dispute by talk. But Bright and Broad told him that all the talking in the world couldn’t convince them that they were wrong.
“There’s just one way to end the argument,” they told Mistah Mule. “And that is to have a slow race.”