She was touched. She told me she was a widow, and I congratulated her on the spur of the moment. She promised refreshments for me and my dog if I would perform some slight manual labor by sawing a cord of wood or so for her. The wood was in the woodshed. I inspected it with a sad and regretful eye. It never did agree with me to saw wood, and I offered to shovel the sunshine off the widow’s front walk.
But she was impervious to my argument, and so, peeling off my coat, I seized the bucksaw and went at it. The saw needed honing, and I must admit that I was greatly discouraged by the time I had amputated the first stick or two. I knew I’d never last to finish the job on an empty stomach, and this led me to set my colossal intellect at work on the problem.
The widow had gone into the house to get breakfast. I paused and pondered. A scheme came to me. I made an effort and found that by zizzing my breath through my teeth and lips I could produce an excellent imitation of a dull bucksaw cutting through a stick of wood. For the next half hour or more I sat on the chopping block zizzing with consummate industry, lifting and dropping a stick of wood at regular intervals, so that it would fall with a thud loud enough to be heard in the kitchen.
As soon as I dared, I put on my coat and strolled into the kitchen, pretending to wipe beads of perspiration from my alabaster brow, and betraying every skymptom of excessive exhaustion.
“Goodness!” exclaimed the widow, in surprise. “Did you saw the whole of that wood as soon as this?”
“Yes, madam,” I answered, “I saw the whole of that wood.”
Then she regaled me with a sumptuous breakfast of ham and beans and corn bread and coffee, and by the time little Fido and I were eternally satiated the table looked as if it had been keeping a date with a Kansas cyclone.
“You were indeed hungry,” said the kind widow. “You are very young to be walking all the way to Boston to reach the bedside of a dying great-grandmother. Now, your parents——”
“Are both dead,” I sighed.
“Oh,” said she, “you’re an orphan. Have you been so——”