It looked as if Batten and Bill were going to settle down to starve us out—a regular siege. They knew, of course, that we two boys couldn’t carry off the engine; but, then, they must have guessed that they couldn’t keep us bottled up very long. They had seen Sammy, and Sammy was gone. If I had been in their shoes I would have reasoned out that he was gone for help. We knew he wasn’t gone for anything but to get away from the poor-farm man, but what we knew didn’t help Batten and Bill.
We sat and watched them, and they sat and watched us. Once in a while one of them would get up and move around, but for a half-hour by Mark’s watch they didn’t make a hostile advance.
“They ain’t got as much sense as I give ’em credit for,” Mark says.
“I hope they don’t git more’n they’ve got,” says I.
“If they hain’t clean foolish,” he says, “they’ll figger it out pretty soon.”
“If it was back in the time of knights and armor and them things,” I told him, “they’d think of shields quick. But nobody civilized has used sich things for hundreds of years. Men jest stand up and git shot. That’s why they don’t git the idee. Maybe Batten and Bill ain’t educated so’s they know about armor.”
“I should think,” says Mark, deliberate-like, “they’d git educated. Nobody’d have to shoot me with pebbles more’n a dozen times before I thought of gittin’ behind somethin’ or other.”
Men are never as quick planning things as boys. And when they do scheme something out it generally isn’t as good. You take a boy and he’ll hit on more good things in an hour than a man will in a week. It doesn’t look to me as though imaginations grew up with most men; they leave them behind somewheres before they git old enough to vote.
After a while we saw Bill jump up and take a jack-knife out of his pocket. He looked around searching, and then went over to a clump of willows which he began to cut down and throw in a pile.
“What’s that for?” I wanted to know.