"Well," resumed Mrs. Penniman, feeling that the last value had been extracted from mere suspense, "anyway, it seems that this morning poor little Patricia Whipple was going by the old graveyard, and the twins jumped out and knocked her down and dragged her in there away from the road and simply tore every stitch of clothes off her back and made her dress up in Wilbur's clothes——"
"There!" gasped the horrified Winona. "Didn't I say it would be Wilbur?"
"And then what did they do but cut off her braid with a knife!"
"Wilbur's knife—Merle hasn't any."
"And the Lord knows what the little fiends would have done next, but Juliana Whipple happened to be passing, and heard the poor child's screams and took her away from them."
"That dreadful, dreadful Wilbur!" cried Winona.
"Reform school," spoke the judge, as if he uttered it from the bench.
"But something queer," went on Mrs. Penniman. "Juliana took the twins home in the pony cart, with Wilbur wearing Patricia's dress—it's a plaid gingham I made myself—and someone gave him a lot of money and let him go, and they didn't give Merle any because Ed Seaver saw them on River Street, and Wilbur had it all. And what did Patricia Whipple say to Don Paley but that she was going to have one of the twins for her brother, because no one else would get her a brother, and so she must. But what would she want one of those little cutthroats for? That's what puzzles me."
"Merle is not a cutthroat," said Winona with tightening lips. "He never will be a cutthroat." She left all manner of permissible suspicions about his brother.
"Well, it just beat me!" confessed her mother. "Maybe they've been reading Wild West stories."