But no one thought long of being serious with “Ni.” He was along in the teens somewhere, not large for his years but extremely wiry and muscular, and the funniest boy any of us ever knew of. How the son of such a sad-faced, gloomy, old licensed exhorter as “Jee” Hagadorn could be such a running spring of jokes and odd sayings and general deviltry as “Ni,” passed all our understandings. His very face made you laugh, with its wilderness of freckles, its snub nose, and the comical curl to its mouth. He must have been a profitable investment to the butcher who hired him to drive about the country. The farmers' wives all came out to laugh and chat with him, and under the influence of his good spirits they went on buying the toughest steaks and bull-beef flanks, at more than city prices, year after year. But anybody who thought “Ni” was soft because he was full of fun made a great mistake.
“I see you ain't doin' much ditchin' this year,” “Ni” remarked, glancing over our fields as he started up the horse. “I should think you'd be tickled to death.”
Well, in one sense I was glad. There used to be no other such back-aching work in all the year as that picking up of stones to fill into the trenches which the hired men began digging as soon as the hay and grain were in. But on the other hand, I knew that the present idleness meant—as everything else now seemed to mean—that the Beech farm was going to the dogs.
“No,” I made rueful answer. “Our land don't need drainin' any more. It's dry as a powder-horn now.”
“Ni” clucked knowingly at the old horse. “Guess it's Abner that can't stand much more drainin',” he said. “They say he's looking all round for a mortgage, and can't raise one.”
“No such thing!” I replied. “His health's poorly this summer, that's all. And Jeff—he dont seem to take hold, somehow, like he used to.”
My companion laughed outright. “Mustn't call him Jeff any more,” he remarked with a grin. “He was telling us down at the house that he was going to have people call him Tom after this. He can't stand answerin' to the same name as Jeff Davis,” he says.
“I suppose you folks put him up to that,” I made bold to comment, indignantly.
The suggestion did not annoy “Ni.” “Mebbe so,” he said. “You know Dad lots a good deal on names. He's down-right mortified that I don't get up and kill people because my name's Benaiah. ‘Why,’ he keeps on saying to me, ‘Here you are, Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, as it was in Holy Writ, and instid of preparin’ to make ready to go out and fall on the enemies of righteousness, like your namesake did, all you do is read dime novels and cut up monkey-shines generally, for all the world as if you'd been named Pete or Steve or William Henry.' That's what he gives me pretty nearly every day.”