Well, that was so.
Pretty soon it commenced to get dark, and from then the time went slower and slower. Neither of us had a watch, so we couldn’t tell what time it was, and we decided to go up on top of the tower to listen if we could hear the town clock in Wicksville. We kept on listening a long time, and then it struck. Eight o’clock, it said, and I would have been willing to bet a minute before that it was ten at least.
“If you wait l-l-long enough,” says Mark, with a grin, “any l-length of time passes by.”
I hadn’t ever thought of that before, but you could see right off that it was so. Mark was always discovering new things.
That’s how it happened now. We kept on waiting, and after a couple of years the town clock struck ten. Then we waited what we judged was a half an hour.
“Jethro ought to be in b-bed now,” says Mark.
“If he’s ever goin’,” says I.
“T-take off your shoes,” says Mark, which we both did, and crept down the attic stairs as quiet as a couple of cats. We opened the door into the second-floor hall pretty cautious, and listened. There wasn’t a sound. Then we sneaked along the hall to the top of the stairs, and still we didn’t hear a thing. I kept wishing we could hear a good, snorting snore, and then we’d be sure Jethro was out of the way.
After a minute we went down the first-floor stairs, and was just at the bottom and turning toward the back of the house when the front-door bell rang. I ’most jumped out of my skin. We stood stalk still a second, and then we heard a sound in a room at the left like somebody getting up out of a chair.
“Quick!” says Mark, and he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into a little sort of cubbyhole under the stairs.