Jack returned, watch in hand—he had been getting railroad time from the telegraph operator. “Want to set yours while you think of it?” he asked Jonathan.
“Sorry—thank you—didn’t bring it,” said Jonathan.
“By George, man, what’ll you do?” Real consternation sounded in Jack’s tones.
“Oh, we’ll get along somehow,” said Jonathan. “You see, we don’t have many engagements, except with the bass, and they never meet theirs, anyhow.”
When the train had gone, I said, “Jonathan, why didn’t you tell them it was my whim?”
“Oh, I just didn’t,” said Jonathan.
As Jonathan had predicted, we did get along somehow—got along rather well, on the whole. There are, of course, some drawbacks to an unwatched life. You never want to start the next meal till you are hungry, and after that it takes one or two or three hours, as the case may be, to go back to camp and get the meal ready, and by that time you are almost hungrier than you like being. But except for this, and the little matter of meeting trains, it is rather pleasant to break away from the habit of watching the watch, and it was with real regret that, on the last night of our camp, we took our watch to the farmhouse to set it.
“Run down, did it? Guess you forgot to wind it. Well—we do forget things sometimes, all of us do,” the farmer’s wife said comfortingly as she went to look at the clock. “Twenty minutes to seven, our clock says. It’s apt to be fast, so I guess you won’t miss any trains. Father he says he’d rather have a clock fast than slow any day, but it don’t often get more than ten minutes wrong either way.”
And to us, after our two weeks of camp, [pg 161] ten minutes’ error in a clock seemed indeed slight.
“Jonathan,” I said, as we walked back along the road, “I hate to go back to clock time. I like real time better.”