Rifle-Eye with a gesture stopped him.
"It's just as much my business to talk to you," he said, "as it'd be yours to talk to me. In fact it's more. You c'n talk in your lecture room, an' I'll talk here. Perhaps it ain't altogether your fault; it's just that you don't know any better. You're just a plumb ignorant critter out here, Mister Professor, an' by rights you oughtn't to be around loose.
"An' you tried to threaten a boy here who was doin' his duty by sayin' that you'd write to Washington. What for? Are you so proud o' thievin' an' bullyin' that you want every one to know, or do you want to tell only a part o' the story so as you'll look all right an' the other fellow all wrong. That breed o' Social Economy don't go, not out here. We calls it lyin', an' pretty mean lyin' at that."
He broke off suddenly and looked down with a smile.
"Well, Pussy," he said, "that's right. You come an' back me up," and reaching out his brown gnarled hand he drew to his side the little girl who had come trustingly forward to him as all children did, and now had slipped her little hand into his.
"An' then there's this question o' fire," he continued. "Haven't you got some fireworks for the Fourth, Pussy?" he said, looking down at his little companion.
"Oh, yeth," she lisped, "pin-wheelth, and crackerth, and thnaketh, and heapth of thingth."
"What a time we'll have," he said. "Shall we look at them now?"
"Oh, yeth," the little girl replied, and ran across to her father, "can we thee them now?"
"No, not now," the father replied.