All at once we heard him yell:
“Shut up! Shut up! I tell you. Hain’t you been jawin’ enough? Say! Hain’t you goin’ to give a man no peace?”
Then he jumped up and shut off the machine. Of course the talking stopped. Old Mose grinned proud-like, just as if he’d done something worth while.
“Haw!” says he, “you will, eh? You will set there and jaw and jaw! I’ll show you. Jest like all folks, hain’t you? Want to keep wagglin’ your tongue all the time. But I kin shut you up. Old Mose is the feller that kin turn you off.”
He sat down and chuckled and talked to himself and paid his respects to the way folks like to talk for quite a spell. Then he got up and started off another talking-record. He let it run about two minutes and then up and began yelling at it.
“Whoa-up! You’ve talked enough, mister. Close your mouth and give a body a chance to think.” And up he jumped to turn off the machine again. He acted just as tickled this time as he did before. I never saw anybody get so much pleasure out of anything.
“He d-didn’t buy that phonograph to run,” says Mark. “He bought it to sh-sh-shut off.”
Yes, sir, that was it. The thing he wanted that machine for was to have something that talked that he could shut up whenever he wanted to. The satisfaction he got out of ordering wax records to keep quiet and then making them mind him was a caution.
About a dozen feet to our right was a shed with a roof that sloped back toward the fence. The front of it wasn’t over eight feet from the porch. A clump of sumach grew toward the road and would hide anybody who was of a mind to lie on top of it, and a maple-tree grew right up behind. It was the bulliest kind of a hiding-place. We made for it one at a time, and in three minutes and a half we were all up there, lying in a row, overlooking Old Mose and his porch and his phonograph. We could see and hear everything that went on without a bit of danger of anybody seeing us.
“’Most t-time the folks were comin’,” says Mark in a whisper.