Rock and I tore off, with Plunk and Mark coming along behind, and all lay down like we were tired right in front of the arbor.
“Don’t l-look at the house,” says Mark. “Probably Jethro’s watchin’.”
“There’s your cat,” I says to Mark, pointing over where his stone cat was.
“Huh!” says he. “N-n-ninety degrees in the shade. There’s where you quit walkin’ where she l-looks,” says he. “Right under that tree there.”
The tree was back toward the rear of the house, but out quite a ways from it. We all looked at it.
“I can’t make out,” says Mark, “what the weather has to do with it. Hot or cold, it gits me.”
“Ninety degrees in the shade is pretty hot,” says Plunk.
“Maybe,” says I, “it hain’t got anything to do with how hot it is. Maybe he wrote it that way just to fool folks and make it harder to know what he was tryin’ to tell.”
Mark he looked at me a minute like he was mad. Then he reached over and banged me on the back, and says: “Binney, I sh’u’dn’t be s’prised if you amounted to s-somethin’ some day. Weather was what Mr. Wigglesworth wanted f-folks to think of that happened to see the writin’. So,” says he, “it wasn’t weather he meant at all. I was a noodle not to think of that. Um! ... Ninety degrees. What’s ninety degrees except weather?”
I didn’t think of anything, and nobody else did, either. We thought quite a while, and then Mark slapped his fat leg’ and started to shake all over with one of them still laughs of his. “Why, you boobs,” says he, “ninety degrees is m-measurin’! That’s it. You know a circle? Well, there’s three hunderd and sixty degrees around one. In ’rithmetic or somethin’ they divide up a circle l-like a clock, only, instead of havin’ minutes marked off, they have degrees. Ninety degrees.... Um! ... That’s a quarter of the way around a circle. If you walk to the middle of a circle, and then turn off to the place on the circle that’s ninety degrees from the place where you first stepped on the circle, why, it’s a right angle. See?”