That illustrates better than I can tell what kind of a fellow Mark Tidd was—cautious, looking on all sides of a thing he was thinking of doing, always trying to figure plans out ahead so nothing disagreeable could happen. I don’t want you to think he was a coward, because he wasn’t, but he never ran his head into trouble that could be dodged ahead of time.
We all started for the river, because it would be cooler there even if we didn’t go in, but on the way Mark found a four-leaf clover, and a white cat ran across the road in front of us, so he figured it out that if there was any bad luck about Friday and killing a spider those two good-luck signs had knocked the spots off it.
CHAPTER III
Mark Tidd wasn’t given much to exercise, but that isn’t saying he couldn’t stir around spry if there was some good reason. He never wanted to play baseball or tag or anything where you had to run, and usually when a game was going on he’d be lying under a tree reading a book. He said it was a lot easier reading about a game than playing it, and more interesting than watching the kind we played. He read a good deal, anyhow, mostly, I guess, because you can sit so still to do it, and rest at the same time if you want to; and it was surprising the things he got to know about that were useful to us. Seemed like almost everything we wanted to do Mark would have read about some better way of doing it, and that’s how we came to get up the K. K. K., which stands for Ku Klux Klan.
We were all sitting in Tidd’s yard where the shade of the barn fell, and nobody had said anything for quite a spell. I was beginning to want to do something, and it was easy to see that Plunk and Binney were wriggling around uneasy like; but Mark he lay with his little eyes shut tight, looking as peaceful and satisfied as a turtle on a log. All of a sudden the idea popped into my head, and I yelled right out, “Let’s git up a secret society.”
Mark opened one eye and sort of blinked at me, and Plunk and Binney sat up straight.
“What’ll we call it?” Binney wanted to know.
“Who’ll be officers?” Plunk asked.
“I dunno,” I says, sharp like, because they seemed to think I ought to have the whole thing planned out for them to do without their lifting a hand.
Mark rubbed his eyes and rolled over on his side. “What’s the main thing about a s-secret society?” he asks.