Mr. Tidd smiled at her as patient as could be and patted her hand. Then he felt to see that the Decline and Fall was in his pocket all right, and smiled again at everybody. He was one of the smilingest men I ever saw, and as soon as you saw him do it you liked him right off, whether you knew him or not.
“I’ve put a paper in your satchel, right on the top, telling you just what to do. When you git there you pin it on the wall right over the washstand, and don’t you dare to go out of the hotel without readin’ it. It tells about puttin’ on a clean collar, and to be sure not to go traipsin’ around without a tie, and such-like. Don’t you go neglectin’ it, now.”
“I won’t, my dear, I won’t.”
The train came snorting in, and Mr. Tidd got aboard all right without forgetting his satchel. We reminded him of it. He sat down in the smoking-car and smiled at us through the windows, and Mrs. Tidd shook her finger at him like she was warning him not to forget anything. Then the bell rang and the conductor hollered “All aboard,” and he was gone.
“I’ll never draw an easy breath till he’s back again” said Mrs. Tidd, and she came close to the truth, for she did draw a lot of uneasy breaths before she saw Mr. Tidd again, and so did the rest of us. In fact, I guess there aren’t many folks who have drawn as many uneasy ones as we did for the next several days.
We took Mrs. Tidd home and then looked around for something to do. First we thought we’d go up to see Sammy at the cave, but Mark said he’d gone off up the river fishing and maybe wouldn’t be back that night, so we all sat down on Tidd’s front fence and whittled and talked and wished something would turn up.
“I guess I could git our horse and rig,” Binney said, after a while, “and we could take a ride out into the country if we wanted to.”
“That’s better’n nothin’,” I told him; and the other fellows seemed to agree, so we went off to Binney’s house, and his mother, after arguing a while and telling him the horse would run away and break all our necks, finished up by saying we could go. We took the two-seated rig. Plunk and Binney sat in the front seat, and Mark and I got in behind, which made it pretty crowded for me.
“Which way’ll we go?” Binney wanted to know.
“Let’s go up the river-road,” Plunk said. “Maybe we’ll meet Sammy somewheres with a string of fish and he’ll give us some.”