“Oh!” says I. Mark’s little eyes were opened up wide, and he was staring at uncle like all git-out. Couldn’t quite make up his mind if uncle was fooling us or not.
About fifteen minutes later Jerry Yack hunched his shoulders and moved around uneasy-like. He opened his mouth once and shut it again. Opened it and shut it another time. Then he coughed. Seemed it took all that work to get ready to say something.
“Ay tank,” says he, “ay bane goin’.”
Ole looked up and did considerable wriggling himself. After a while he got ready to speak: “Ay tank,” he says, “ay bane goin’, too.”
They both looked at uncle with their blue eyes wide open like babies. Uncle didn’t say anything. After quite a spell Jerry got around to speak again. He asked a question of uncle.
“W’at you tank? Eh? You bane goin’—yess, or you bane goin’—no?”
Uncle shook his head and recited a poem that made Ole and Jerry look puzzled as anything:
“Shall I go or shall I stay?
That I must decide to-day.”
He waggled his head at us boys. “That hain’t neither exactly nor precisely the fact,” says he; “it’s you boys got to decide. Ole and Jerry here come to git me to help ’em a week or so on the river. Loggin’. Jerkin’ logs out of the river-bed. River-bed’s covered with timber farther down. It’s timber that sunk in the old lumberin’-days, and there’s a heap of it. They got a scow with a derrick onto it. What think?”