“What you’d make,” says Mrs. Tidd, “would be monkeys of yourselves. No use arguin’ with me. You can’t doit.” She turned her back and dropped some more cakes into the grease. “How much you calc’late it’ll cost?” says she.
“Two-three h-hunderd dollars,” says Mark.
“Jest be throwin’ it away,” says Mrs. Tidd. “Now clear out. I don’t want to hear another word about it.”
We turned and went out. Before we were off the back stoop she came to the door. “You go to Lawyer Jones,” says she, “and have him do the buyin’. Hain’t one of you fit to dicker for a cent’s worth of dried fish.”
Mark he looked at me and winked. He knew his ma pretty well, and so did we; but this time I thought she meant what she said.
We all hurried down to Lawyer Jones’s office and told him about it. He acted like he thought Mr. Tidd was crazy, and he said it was an outrage to put the control of a Moulder of Public Opinion—that’s what he called a newspaper—? into the hands of harum-scarum boys. But all the same he chuckled a little and says he figured Wicksville was in for stirring times and he was glad he was alive to watch what was going to happen.
“Tidd,” said Lawyer Jones, when we were through talking about the paper, “did you know Henry Wigglesworth died last night?”
“No,” says Mr. Tidd, looking as if he didn’t quite know who Henry Wigglesworth was. But we boys knew Mr. Wigglesworth was ’most as rich as Mr. Tidd, so folks said. He owned a great big farm—hundreds of acres of it—just outside of town, and he was one of the directors of the bank and of the electric-light company. Altogether, folks believed he must have pretty close to a quarter of a million dollars, and that’s a heap, I can tell you.
Everybody knew Mr. Wigglesworth, but not many were acquainted with him. What I mean by acquainted is what we call so in Wicksville. It means you stop to talk with him, and drop in at his house and stay to dinner if you want to, and go to help when his horse gets sick, and ask him to come help if you get in some kind of a pickle, that’s being acquainted. Well, nobody I know of was that way with Mr. Wigglesworth. I don’t know as I ever heard of a man that had been inside Mr. Wigglesworth’s big house, or that had had Mr. Wigglesworth in his house.
He wasn’t exactly mean. No, he wasn’t that. He was just big, and stern-looking, and dignified, and acted like he wanted folks to let him alone. Mark said to me one day that he acted like he was always sorry about something, but I don’t see what made Mark think so. Anyhow, folks were afraid of him and let him alone, which, probably, was just what he wanted. But he was talked about considerable, you can bet.