“Dinner!” says the big one. “Quit your dining. You’ve eet enough to wake the dead.”
So they starts back to their tent like twins. I expect they were sixty, or seventy, or eighty—I don’t know how long they’d lasted in this world—and one had boots, and the other had his feet tied in gunnysack, and both looked like two-bits’ worth of God-help-us.
But they didn’t get to their tent that time. Down the road comes a nice-lookin’ girl on a calico horse with one blue eye—the horse had—and the little one he sees her and he whirls around and aims his finger at her, same as he done to me.
“No, you don’t!” says he, loud up in the air. “I’ve told you I won’t.”
“I had no intention of speaking about it again,” says she, rather quiet, but smilin’. “But when you find that there’s no coal really there—”
Well, what d’y’u think? It set ’em wild. Both of ’em went plumb wild. I couldn’t hear for a while what the trouble was, because they scrambled their words just like the little one’s hair, talkin’ to the girl and me and the Siwash and each other. But the Siwash he gave another laugh and rode away—he had his mail. I stayed. I hadn’t got used to ’em yet. Thought maybe she’d better have a man around. But they was absolutely harmless. And then I began to understand.
The girl she sat there indulgin’ ’em. Told ’em she wasn’t goin’ to worry ’em about it any more. They told her there was coal there and they was goin’ to supply the whole valley, and it was better than a gold-mine. She might just as well have worried ’em instead of sittin’ so peaceful on the calico horse, because they would never have noticed any worryin’ she could do—they was that busy with the worry they were keepin’ up all by themselves. She was a school-teacher and up to now she’d kept school in a tent. But the valley was going to build a school-house and the best location for it happened to be on some land they’d filed on. Any other place would be too far for somebody’s kids, or for everybody’s, or else hadn’t water convenient. But it seemed they wouldn’t hear of it. I suppose whoever put it to ’em first had put it wrong, and now all y’u had to do was say “school-house” in their hearing, and have a circus prompt.
“Mr. Edmund,” says she to me, “says that if their idea of other minerals is like their idea of coal, it’s no wonder they have found trapping more profitable. But no one can persuade them, and it’s truly a pity about the school-house.” Mr. Edmund kept the store at Beekman.
“If it’s not coal,” says I, “what is it?”
“Oh, slate, or graphite, or something—and just a tiny ledge, and too far from transportation.”