MARK TIDD IN THE BACKWOODS
CHAPTER I
It all started just before school was out. One afternoon when I got home mother showed me a letter from Uncle Hieronymous, who lives in the woods back of Baldwin, on the Middle Branch of the Père Marquette River. I never had seen him, but he and mother wrote to each other quite often, and I guess she’d been telling him a good deal about me, that’s Binney Jenks, and Mark Tidd and Tallow and Plunk. Of course, Mark Tidd was most important. He always thought us out of scrapes. So what did this letter of his do but invite us all to come up to his place and stay the whole summer if we wanted to?
As soon as I read it I was so excited I had to stand up and prance around the room. I couldn’t sit still.
“Can we go, ma? Can we go?” I asked, over and over again, without giving her a chance to answer.
Ma had been thinking it over, because she said yes right off. Ma never says yes to things until she’s had a chance to look at them from all sides and knows just what the chances are for my coming out alive. “You can go if the other boys can,” she told me, and I didn’t wait to hear another word, but went pelting off to Mark’s house.
Mark was in the back yard talking to his father when I got there, and I burst right in on them.
“Can you go?” I hollered. “D’you think you can go?”
“L-l-light somewheres,” says he. “You’re floppin’ around l-l-l-like Bill Durfee’s one-legged ch-chicken.”