“Great if we had a bridge,” says I.
“There’s m-m-more ways of crossin’ a river than on a b-b-bridge,” says he.
“Yes,” I told him, “you can wade. But the wadin’ hain’t very healthy right here.”
“Hum!” says he, and turned around to where he laid the pole he had used to poke the dog with. “H-how’d that do?” he asked me.
“Nobody could walk across it or even crawl across, and if you were to hang by your hands and go over that way the dog ’u’d get your legs.”
“Binney,” says Mark, patronizing-like, “what were you and Tallow and Plunk doing in Plunk’s back yard all last week?”
I thought back and remembered we’d been pole-vaulting. I said so.
“Well?” says Mark.
All of a sudden it hit me. I felt pretty cheap, too. There I was, the fellow that was interested in pole-vaulting and things like that, and here the first time in my life it really would have come in handy I overlooked it altogether. But my head isn’t like Mark’s. He stores up in his everything he sees, thinking maybe he can use it some day.
“I kin vault across, I guess,” I told him, “but you and Jiggins never could. The pole hain’t built that wouldn’t bust under you.”