“So, then,” the resourceful boy continued, “f'r instance, if you give this ole horn to me, that'd prove it was yours, and Sam'd haf to say it was, and he wouldn't have any right to—”
“I won't do it!” said Roddy sourly. “I don't want to give you that horn. What I want to give you anything at all for?”
Penrod sighed, as if the task of reaching Roddy's mind with reason were too heavy for him. “Well, if you don't want to prove it, and rather let us have the right to call you anything we want to—well, all right, then,” he said.
“You look out what you call me!” Roddy cried, only the more incensed, in spite of the pains Penrod was taking with him. “I don't haf to prove it. It's MINE!”
“What kind o' proof is that?” Sam Williams demanded severely. “You GOT to prove it and you can't do it!”
Roddy began a reply, but his agitation was so great that what he said had not attained coherency when Penrod again intervened. He had just remembered something important.
“Oh, I know, Roddy!” he exclaimed. “If you sell it, that'd prove it was yours almost as good as givin' it away. What'll you take for it?”
“I don't want to sell it,” said Roddy sulkily.
“Yay! Yay! YAY!” shouted the taunting Sam Williams, whose every word and sound had now become almost unbearable to Master Bitts. Sam was usually so good-natured that the only explanation of his conduct must lie in the fact that Roddy constitutionally got on his nerves. “He KNOWS he can't prove it! He's a goner, and now we can begin callin' him anything we can think of! I choose to call him one first, Penrod. Roddy, you're a—”
“Wait!” shouted Penrod, for he really believed Roddy's claims to be both moral and legal. When an uncle who does not even play upon an old second-hand horn wishes to get rid of that horn, and even complains of having it on his hands, it seems reasonable to consider that the horn becomes the property of a nephew who has gone to the trouble of carrying the undesired thing out of the house.