“Well, then, let it go at that.”
“There is a danger,” says Motu; “it is my danger, but you offer to share it. For myself I would not accept, but for—for another reason I do accept. I can tell you nothing. I cannot tell you why there is a danger. But I can tell you that there will be no dishonor to you in giving me help. I have done nothing wrong.”
“Oh,” says Mark, “you didn’t need to say that. We knew it already.”
Motu shot him a look out of his black eyes that was good to see.
“Do you calc’late the four we saw are all there are after you, or can we expect more of them to come moseying along?”
“I think the four are all. There may be one other.” He said that as if the one other was a different kind of person from the four, and you can take it from me as solemn fact, he was. Different! Well, I should say so. As different as a darning-needle is to a crowbar or a weasel to a hippopotamus. “There may be one other, but he will think, not act,” says Motu. “Him we should dread.”
“One of those thinkers, is he?” says I. “Well, I guess we can match him. Huh! Wait till Mark Tidd gets to playin’ checkers with your thinker, and we’ll see.”
“Ah,” says Motu, looking at Mark again, this time like he was sort of weighing him and measuring him. “The one who will come has a cunning brain. Many plots he has made.”
“If he goes makin’ any plots around here he’ll think he bumped into the side of a house—and a brick house, at that. Why, Mark Tidd—”
“That’s p-p-plenty from you, Tallow,” says Mark, sort of cross, but I could tell by his eyes that he was pleased just the same. He likes compliments, but the ones that tickle him most are the ones about his head. Mark Tidd would rather think up a great scheme than win the hundred-yard dash in the Olympic games—and I never could understand it. I guess it’s because I’m stronger in the legs than inside the skull.