“Calc’late Miss Piggins knows?”
“No,” says Mark. “George would be mighty scairt, and he wouldn’t tell her, knowin’ how she loves to w-w-waggle her tongue. He’d be afraid of her l-lettin’ it out.”
Well, that didn’t look like much of a job—to find George Piggins. All we had to do was to search the United States and Canada and Mexico and Europe and Asia and Africa and Australia and a few other places for a man that you wouldn’t notice much, anyhow. That’s the kind of a fellow George was. You could look right at him without noticing him. He just didn’t count. He was the kind of man that would steal a hog, and when you’ve said that you’ve said quite considerable. George was one of them sloping folks. His forehead kind of sloped back into his hair and his chin sloped back into his collar and his shoulders sloped forward into his neck and his knees sloped in toward each other. There wasn’t anything bad about George even if he did steal a hog. He wasn’t the stealing kind, regular, but he didn’t ever do a thing in a hard way when he could do it easier, and he probably found it was easier to get that hog by swiping it than it would have been to buy it. He was a regular rabbit except that he couldn’t jump. He might fall off of something, but he’d never jump off it. Why, he didn’t even have a nickname. Folks called him George all his life, or maybe Georgie. Imagine a grown man being called Georgie! Whew! It’s enough to give you a stummick-ache.
And that’s the kind of fellow we had to find. If he had been a big man with red hair and a hook nose and that sort of thing, it wouldn’t have been so hard. But to find a fellow that you’d pass on the street without realizing that you passed anybody—well, that was different.
“Most likely,” says I, “he’s burrowing like a rabbit. Bet he hasn’t done more than poke his nose out since he hid up.”
“One t-t-thing George has got to do,” says Mark, “and that’s eat.”
Mark would be sure to think of that. It was surprising how much his mind turned to eating. Somehow almost any subject you might mention would make him think of grub.
We talked it over quite a spell, but didn’t arrive at any notion of what to do. Then we went home to supper, but we met at Mark’s house in the evening and went for a walk.
We went slow down-town, because we weren’t heading any place in particular, and we stopped at the pump awhile to listen to Uncle Ike Bond argue politics with anybody that came along. I guess Uncle Ike knew more about politics than anybody in the world, and it’s a funny thing to me he never mixed into them and got to be governor or something, but he never did. He said his mission in life was to see that folks caught trains, and that was enough for him. There’s no telling how many trains folks would have missed if it hadn’t been for Uncle Ike, but he was always on hand long enough ahead so that even Miss Pitcher, that was never on time for anything, and always lost her pocketbook just as she was starting out, would have plenty of leeway to get all fixed for going. We didn’t stay long, because Uncle Ike swung off into some kind of an argument about what kind of a man ought to be elected constable.
Without having any particular idea where we were heading for, we went up the street, and the first thing we knew we were looking down at the mill and the dam, and we stopped and looked her over kind of proud-like. It does make you sort of proud to look at something you’re running yourself. I never thought much of Silas Doolittle Bugg’s mill till I got mixed up with it, but after that it seemed to me like it was one of the biggest and remarkablest mills in the country.