“Mornin’, neighbor Edwards,” he exclaimed, as Uncle Ruben appeared at the door. “’Pears to me you look sorter blue, don’t you?”
“I’m so blue it’ll rub off,” replied Uncle Ruben, as he walked out to the fence and rested his arm on the top rail. “Silas cheated me fearful. I let him have too much money on that mortgage, an’ I shan’t get it back into a good many dollars. Then there’s that there boy, George—”
“Yes, I seen him a little while back,” said Mr. Brown, facing about in his wagon and looking up the road in the direction in which George had disappeared. “He had a big bundle on his back, an’ when I asked him if he had found work anywhere, he said he hadn’t, an’, what was more, he wasn’t goin’ to look for any. Where do you reckon he’s goin’?”
“Up into the hills, to live like a wild Injun,” replied Uncle Ruben, in a tone of disgust. “But I told him that that wasn’t no respectable way to live, an’ that I wouldn’t never consent to it.”
“I wouldn’t, neither,” said Mr. Brown.
“I offered to give him a good home, an’ all he could eat and wear, if he would work for me till he was twenty-one; an’ do you s’pose he would do it? No, he wouldn’t,” continued Uncle Ruben. “He jest as good as told me that he didn’t ask no odds of me nor anybody else. Now, Jonathan, don’t you think that, seein’ as how I shall lose twenty-five, and mebbe fifty dollars of the money I loaned my brother Silas on this property—don’t you r’ally think that that there boy had oughter make it up to me? Couldn’t I force him to do it?”
Mr. Brown scratched his head vigorously, and assumed an air of profound wisdom as he replied:
“I disremember jest now what the law has to say on that p’int; but I’ll look it up.”
“An’ don’t you think, Jonathan, that the boy was a fool to refuse a good home when I offered it to him?”
“Well,” replied Mr. Brown, slowly, “to be honest with you, Ruben, I don’t know who was the biggest fool—you or George.”