“Where you goin’, Mark?”
“Home, too. I got consid’able th-thinkin’ to do. How’d you expect me to m-make money with this business if I don’t study it some?”
Anybody’d ’a’ thought it was his business, to hear him talk, and I guess he’d already begun thinking it was. No matter what he tackled, he was just that way. Every time he set his heart on doing something, whether it was for himself or for somebody else, he went at it like he owned the whole shebang and had to come out on top or get dragged off to the poorhouse.
I started to walk off, but Mark called after me:
“B-b-better gimme those keys. I’ll be down ’fore you are in the mornin’, and maybe I’ll have to go down to-night.”
Well, sir, I handed over the keys and didn’t say a word. I could see who was going to be the head of that business while dad was gone, and that feller’s name wasn’t Plunk Smalley.
“I hope,” says I, after thinking it over a minute, “that you’ll at least give me a job.”
“Huh!” snorts Mark. “If you don’t git wider awake than you usually be I dun’no’s the business can afford to h-have you around.” But right after that he grinned, and when Mark Tidd grins nobody can be mad with him or envy him or think he is bossing the job more than he ought to.
“T-tell your mother not to worry,” he yelled after me.
It was possible for mother to go with father and leave me at home because Aunt Minnie was there. Aunt Minnie was my father’s sister, and she lived with us because if she hadn’t she would have had to live alone, and she couldn’t live alone because she was afraid. One day I started to count up the things Aunt Minnie was afraid of, but it wasn’t any use. I guess if she was to set out and try she could be afraid of anything. She was afraid of pigs, and of thunder, and of tramps, and of bumblebees, and of the dark, and of sun-stroke, and of book agents, and of— Why, once she lay awake all night and shivered on account of a red-flannel undershirt hanging on the line. I’d rather have stayed at Mark’s house or somewheres than with her, but it wasn’t any use. There’s no fun staying with a woman that’s all the time squealing and squinching and jumping like somebody shoved a pin into her.