“Suppose,” says Mark, “this was a castle—the whole hotel. And suppose we was the g-g-garrison. Along comes an army of knights and men-at-arms to capture us.” All of a sudden he got interested, his little eyes began to shine, and his fingers sort of twitched. His imagination was going. “Listen,” says he, “don’t you hear a trumpet off in the m-m-mountains? Sure. They’re a-comin’. What’ll we do?”
“Fight,” says Plunk.
“Sure,” says Mark, “but we got to have a plan of b-b-battle. We’ve got food and water to think of.”
“Plenty of both,” says I.
“Suppose the castle over there was s-s-surrounded. We’d have food, but we couldn’t g-get to water. I’ll tell you: we’d b-better fetch a store of food over here across the bridge. Then if it got too hot for us in the castle we could retreat and tear down the bridge and be pretty s-s-safe here. Eh?”
“Sure,” says Binney.
“Come on, then,” says Mark. “We’ll divide the stores and f-fetch half over here in case of emergency.”
Of course it was all just pretending, but it seemed mighty real with Mark telling it, and before we knew it we were all working like nailers to get the canned stuff across into the house where the boats were. It was heavy lifting, but somehow it was fun and as exciting as if hostile men-at-arms were actually coming down out of the mountains to attack us.
We got everything all arranged and sat down to rest.
“They can attack now any time they w-want to,” says Mark. “We’re ready for ’em.”