Sometimes Delbert would use some other stone then, or he would coolly wait until Davie got over his pouts and brought forth the good one, or else he would slyly hunt it up and use it without Davie’s knowledge, carefully replacing it when he had finished.
But one day he could not find it, and Davie simply would not get it. Marian herself wanted it too, but Davie resisted even her coaxing. Delbert lost all patience, and Marian began to wonder on the second day if some measure more strenuous than common might not be needed. She began to think that perhaps the child himself did not know where it was; it might possibly be that he had lost it instead of hiding it. He was so little and his speech was so limited as yet that she did not always feel sure that she understood him perfectly. Perhaps he simply did not want to admit that he had not been bright enough to keep track of the valuable thing himself. But then Esther saw him playing with the stone off by himself. When she ran to tell Marian, however, he hid it again and only smiled impishly at their requests.
No, he was simply being naughty, and, what was worse, was staying naughty; so after a little Marian issued her verdict.
“I won’t punish him, though I could probably make him get it by spanking him, but mother never did that to him, and I will not till I really have to, but the next time any of you see that whetstone you may take it from him and I will confiscate it and it won’t be his stone any more.”
“But,” said Jennie dubiously, “it is his stone; he found it, Marian.”
“That is true,” returned her sister, “and if it were some less necessary thing I would say he had a right to do as he chose with it, but a whetstone is something we all need. I need it to sharpen the hatchet with; nothing else I can find does so well. Delbert needs it right now to sharpen his knife, so he can work out that bone arrowhead. It is to Davie’s interest as well as ours that the hatchet and knives should be sharp, only he is so little he can’t realize it. Just because he saw the stone first does not give him a right to hide it away and refuse to let us use it, when we all need the use of it and there is not another one like it that we know of.”
She explained this all as well as she could to Davie, but he remained obdurate. They set themselves to work, therefore, to ferret out the much-needed implement, and before long Delbert found it and brought it in triumph to Marian, who took possession of it amid Davie’s loud wails.
His crying availed him nothing, however; the stone was put in a cleft of the rock where only Marian and Delbert could reach it, and the young would-be monopolist finally decided that it was not worth crying for, and, smoothing out his face, trotted about his affairs as sweetly important as ever.