“Kin you starve magic out of a feller?” says Tallow.
“You kin s-s-starve ’most anythin’ out,” says Mark.
“All right,” says I. “Let’s git at it. That king may be turnin’ to lard this minute, and what good is a king that hain’t nothin’ but a lump of lard?”
“Use him for pie crust,” says Tallow, who wasn’t much on imagining things.
Well, we moseyed down to the mill.
“We’ll s-s-separate into two parties,” says Mark. “Plunk and me will go up the log-slide at this end of the m-m-mill. Tallow and Binney kin come in from the other end. That way we’ll catch him between us.”
So we done that. Mark and I crept cautious around to the log-slide and went up it, and it was a job for a cat in that darkness. Once we was inside the mill it was a lot worse. I’ve been in the dark once or twice, but that’s the first time I was ever in dark that was so dark you had to push it away from you. Honest, I could reach out and grab chunks of it, and it felt like it would pack like snow.
When we got inside we stopped and listened, but there wasn’t a sound.
Then Mark whispered in my ear: “Go along s-soft. That there magician’s got ears like a cat.”
“Kin he see in the dark?” says I.