“Did you ever hear of the K-k-k-ku K-k-k-klux K-k-k-klan?”

“What?” I asked.

He said it over again.

“I didn’t git it that time,” I told him. “Sounds like a tongue-tied hen tryin’ to cackle.”

Mark sort of scowled at me and did it all over, but not one of us could make a thing of it.

“Write it,” I said; “that’s the only way we’ll ever git it.”

At first he wasn’t going to do it, but we argued with him that it wasn’t any use spoiling a good thing like a secret society just because he couldn’t mention plain a name he wanted to tell us; so at last he wrote it down on a piece of paper. What he wrote was Ku Klux Klan.

“It don’t make no sense,” Binney said. “What language is it, anyhow? Dutch?”

“It ain’t no language. It’s a name.”

“Oh.”