“Nobody’d hang around all night and all day for this much joke.”
He admitted that was right. “But ’tain’t no wild man,” he insisted. “There ain’t none.”
“I dunno,” I says.
And then Binney and Plunk came along with their arms stacked full of wood.
Mark and I kept quiet before them, but we arranged that we’d keep watch to-night by twos instead of all alone. “It’ll be more sociable,” I says; and they jumped at the idea.
Mark and I were to stand guard the first part of the night, and Binney and Plunk would be on watch till morning. That was the way it was fixed. About nine o’clock they turned in, and we went out by the fire.
“Let’s be sure there’s enough wood,” I said to him. “I’d sort of hate to be left out here in the dark.”
He grunted, but I noticed he looked at the pile pretty careful, and even dragged in some pieces that were lying within reach.
For maybe an hour we got along fine. Not a thing happened, and we found lots of things to talk about. We got to figuring about his father’s turbine and what it would do and how much money Mr. Tidd would make out of it, and it sounded pretty important. Some day we were sure there’d be big shops in Wicksville where the engines would be manufactured, and Mark would be general manager when he got through college, and all the rest of us would have good jobs. I was going to be a mechanical engineer some day, so Mark agreed to put me in charge of that department. We figured his father would make maybe four or five thousand dollars in a single year.
“If he m-makes anything,” said Mark.