And I seen they both meant it. And I seen this really grieved Edmund instead of pleasin’ him. He took it to heart. Well, sir, I just went acrost the store and lay down on the flour-sacks. Kicked up my heels. Guess I made more noise than the old men did. After a minute I lifted up to see what Edmund was doin’, and he’d pushed his spectacles up high on his forehead and was lookin’ at the two scrappin’ about Washington, D.C., out of his awful solemn eyes; so I laid down again flat. If Edmund had talked I couldn’t have heard him, but as a matter of fact he just let ’em go it alone; and they, like they pretty much always done, got switched off on to somethin’ else—this time it was the traps. There was some number fours hanging there, and they both happened to agree it was number fours they would take when they started into the mountains to trap for the winter. So traps made ’em forget about Washington, D.C., and it had made ’em forget about exposin’ Edmund, which had made ’em forget the coal-mine and the school-house, and so they departed entirely peaceful out of the store and over the Thowmet to their tent, which they had moved up to the Forks. Then I looks up from the sacks again. There stands Edmund behind his desk, same as ever, spectacles away up on his forehead, only now his solemn eyes was fixed on me. And I looks at him, not knowin’ what on earth he’s goin’ to say or whether he’s mad or ain’t mad—for y’u couldn’t often tell from his face. For a young man—and he was young—he was a lot growed up. I expect he knew sorrow early. Both of us was quite silent.
“I didn’t know they didn’t know,” says Edmund, like he was breaking the news of a death to y’u.
And I lays right down again on the sacks.
“Good Lord!” says Edmund, “what ignorance. The capital of their country!”
But I could only fight for my breath, and cry and cry.
Next time I could see anything, there was Edmund sittin’ on the counter clost alongside of me, legs danglin’ against the sacks. But that time when I looked at him he laughed—laughed all through fit to kill himself, same as I’d been doin’. And it was at himself, y’u know, as well as at the whole thing; he included himself in the show.
“You’re quite right,” says he.
That was what made y’u love Edmund. When a thing like Washington, D.C., came up, he’d most always get it wrong first—see the bad side of it too big and the good side too small—he had a heap of misplaced seriousness in his system to conquer. But he’d sure conquer it every time if y’u gave him time. It took me the whole first week I worked for him in the store to find this out. Edmund was the squarest man I have ever known. Too square. And about the finest. He was from an Eastern college and entirely wasted on the Thowmet Valley, where nobody but him had any education or understood honesty as he understood it.
“But they’re obstacles to the public good here, all the same,” said he next; and I had to think back before I saw he meant the old men was obstructin’ the school-house and thereby withholdin’ light from the young hope of the great empire of the Northwest.
He came back to it too, several days after that, while the school-teacher was orderin’ slate-pencils.