“Content has; she told me, and I’ve heard it in dozens of ways. I know it, sure.”
Fritzy considered Content a responsible person, if there was one anywhere. Her testimony seemed conclusive, but he had not yet exhausted the subject. “Do they keep fish-hooks?”
“Fish-hooks, and rods, and—everything.”
“How would you go?”
“If I were you, and had seventy-five cents to spend?”
“Yep,” answered the younger cousin, fixing his eyes anew on the quarter-dollars, and roughly estimating how many fish-hooks and how much “taffy” they represented.
“I’d harness my pony to the cart, and I’d drive down the mountain like split. But, first, I’d help my poor cousin to learn all about anatomy.”
“What’s a ‘natomy?’”
“What’s a boy but a living interrogation point! Come! I’m not going to argue all day. If you want the seventy-five cents, and the taffy, and the fish-hooks, and any other thing you happen to see, why, now’s your chance. If you don’t, all right. I can hire Luke Tewksbury to help me. He’d do it for a quarter, and throw in a kitten to bind the bargain.”
Fritz’s own truthfulness made him accept this statement literally. The silver in his cousin’s hand assumed larger proportions; and the sudden remembrance of how long it was since he had really tasted taffy overcame his last scruple.