“And barnacles is a nuisance, hain’t they?”
“They be.”
“Well, then, is boys barnacles?” says Rameses III, and he threw back his head and let out a bellow, and slapped his knee, and rocked back and forth in his chair, and reached over and poked old Tom in the ribs. I thought he was going to have a fit. “There,” says he, “that settles it. A barnacle is a nuisance, but a boy hain’t a barnacle, so a boy jest can’t be a nuisance, because if he was a nuisance he’d be a barnacle, and he hain’t a barnacle, and there you be.”
“I hain’t convinced,” says Naboth.
“And I hain’t convinced by your argument,” says Rameses III.
“Tom here has heard both sides,” says Naboth. “Let’s leave it to him.”
“Sure,” says Rameses III, “Tom’ll be the judge. Speak up Tom, fair and honest. Which of us has got the best of it? Which one made the best argument?”
Tom puffed a few moments, and kind of waggled his head, and squinted his eyes, and acted like a man trying to digest something pretty knotty. Once he opened his mouth, but he wasn’t quite ready to say anything, so he shut it up again, and held it shut with his hand, as if he was afraid it might open up and say something before he wanted it to. It was kind of hard for Naboth and Rameses III to wait. You could see they were all het up and anxious, but neither of them dared say a word for fear of upsetting Tom. Pretty soon Tom let loose of his jaw so he could open, and rolled his eyes, and cleared his throat three times, and he spit over the side. Then he blinked his eyes and stared at Catty and me. By that time he got around to opening up his mouth.
“It’s a tie,” he says, and then shut his mouth and kind of locked it again for the day.
Well, it was hard on Catty and me. There we were. With that argument a tie, how were we ever to know whether we were nuisances or not, and it would be weighing on our minds. You can’t help letting a thing like that worry you.