“Eh?” says old-man Fugle.
“How much does Silas owe you?”
“Hain’t I been tellin’ you? Confound it! where’s your ears?”
Mark pushed a sheet of paper at him. “Please write the amount d-down there,” he says.
Old-man Fugle scowled at the paper and waggled his whiskers and took a bite out of the pencil. Then he got over the paper so close his nose touched it, and he wrapped his fingers around the pencil so he didn’t know whether he was writing with it or with his finger-nail, and made some marks. I could see the paper better than the other fellows, and when I saw what he had put down I felt like yelling “Fire!” and running for home. The figures was two hunderd and seventy-two dollars and sixty-one cents!
He shoved the paper over to Mark, and Mark looked at it and turned kind of pink and sniffed and looked at me. I guess the wind was took out of his sails for once.
“What’s—what’s this for?” says he.
“For you to pay,” says old-man Fugle.
“What did you s-s-sell Silas?” says Mark.
“Logs,” says old-man Fugle.