With all his forgetting and absent-mindedness and inventing he was one of the most patient men. I never heard him speak sharp, and, no matter what happened, good or bad, he took it just the same, not seeming much disturbed; and always simple and kind-spoken to everybody. He always would stop to answer questions or explain things or just talk to us boys if we came into the shop, and never told us to get out or quit bothering him. Nothing bothered him. But Mrs. Tidd wasn’t that way. She’d worry and worry, and sometimes when she was flying around up to her ears in work she’d out with something cross, not meaning it at all, but letting it fly off the tip of her tongue. But she was never short with Mr. Tidd and never exasperated with him, no matter what he forgot or did wrong.
All four of us—that is, Mark and Plunk and Binney and me—went out to Mr. Tidd’s shop to ask if Mark could come with us and camp Friday night and Saturday and Saturday night and Sunday at our cave. The rest of us had asked and could go if we wanted to. We wanted to, but we didn’t want to without Mark.
Mr. Tidd was tinkering and filing and fussing around with some little parts of his turbine, and we had to speak two or three times before he heard us; then he turned around surprised-like and said, “Bless my soul, bless my soul,” as if we had just come from a thousand miles away in an airship. He laid down his tools and leaned his arm on his bench and stared at us a minute. Then he said “Bless my soul” again and reached for his handkerchief.
“You’ve got it tied around your neck,” Binney told him.
Mr. Tidd felt and found it where Binney said. “Well, well,” he sort of whispered. “However come that there?”
“Pa,” began Mark, “can I go camping at the cave? The fellers are goin’.”
“Camping,” said Mr. Tidd; “camping at the cave? To be sure—at the cave. Um! What cave?”
“Our cave,” we all said at once.
We told him all about it, and he was as interested as could be, asking questions and nodding his head and smiling, just like he wanted to go to the cave himself.
“Can I go, pa?” Mark asked, when we were through.