The guide smiled derisively: “Wal, I reckons not,” while the boy, too interested for reply, asked again:
“What’s a watch?” and the man with his genial laugh said:
“Son, we will be greatly pleased if you will take lunch with us. My name is Polk, Samuel Polk,” he said, touching his cap with the unfailing courtesy of a true gentleman. “And after we eat I will show you the watch and tell you all about it.”
But the mountaineer does not readily eat with “furriners,” so Steve stood near by and looked on while the two men ate very strange things. Little cans were opened and tiny fish taken out that looked exceedingly queer. Mr. Polk, trying to persuade the boy to eat, explained that these were sardines, some square, white things were crackers, a thick stuff was cheese and that some big, round, yellow things were oranges. But Steve only stared in silence till the meal was over though Tige, with no instinctive handicap, accepted delicious scraps with astonishment and relish.
So amazed, however, had the boy been with it all that 16 he nearly forgot about the watch. But when he remembered and the man let him take it in his rusty, brown fingers, that was the most wonderful moment of all. The tick, tick inside was a marvel, almost a thing uncanny to the boy, and when it was explained how the hands went round and round, telling the time of day, it surely seemed a thing beyond mortal ken.
The guide drawled out with a superior air: “Wal, sonny, you come from the backwoods shore ef you never heerd tell of a watch before.”
The boy looked squarely at him in sullen resentment a moment, but with such opportunity at hand he wouldn’t waste time with the likes of him. He asked, “What moves them things round?” and the man kindly opened the watch at the back and displayed all the cunning wheels which respond to the loosening spring, explained how it was wound each day to keep it from running down, and in answer to the boy’s eager questions as to how such things were made told him something of watch manufacture.
At last the wonderful hour was over and the two strange men prepared to leave.
“Good-bye, son,” said the man; “one of these days you will leave the mountains and go out into the big world to live a life of usefulness and honour, I hope.”