“Is it near here,—near this very Old Knollsboro’ town?”
“Hm-m! I vum I never see nothin’ like ye! I do b’lieve ye ain’t right bright!”
“Is it?” again demanded the child, oblivious to any personal remarks.
“I dunno nothin’ ’bout printed trash, an’ you hain’t no call to, nuther. But you’ll hear sunthin’ ’at ’ll make yer ears buzz if you don’t put them books right square back where ye got ’em! I ain’t a goin’ ter wait on ye, like you ’pear ter be uset ter havin’ folks do! I’ve got the fires ter ’tend, the chores ter do, an’ ten thousan’ more pesky things, all this very mornin’, an’ my lumbago achin’ me fit ter split.”
“What’s a lumbago?” asked Steenie, sitting up cross-legged, and trying to hold the great book on her small lap.
“It’s—Thunder an’ lightnin’! Ou—uch!” With a groan that was almost a yell, Resolved arose from the stooping posture which, in an unwary moment, he had assumed before the grate he was cleaning, and clapped his gnarled fingers to “the small of his back.”
Whereupon Steenie likewise sprang up and retreated to the further corner of the apartment, leaving the volume de luxe to fall where it happened. “What’s the matter?” she demanded, from that safe distance, half-laughing, half-crying, for her vivid imagination had been overwrought by the lurid pictures she had been studying, and Mr. Tubbs’s shriek seemed to presage some of the intolerable torments which she had seen depicted.
“The lumbago, I told ye! Blast a youngun,—etarnally askin’ questions! Wait till ye git ter be as old as I be, an’ you ’ll know, I guess!”
“I’ll wait!” responded Steenie, willingly, and with no intentional disrespect.
“Ye will, will ye? you saas-box! Where ye ever lived ter have no respect fer age?” And, mindless of his affliction, the exasperated Mr. Tubbs started in pursuit of the offender, to drive her from his sight.