“That’s neither here nor there,” answered the baker, having always been a man of business; “but wherever I go, I pay my way. However, your Kit was down there, and no mistake. What you think he done? He punched Sam Henderson’s head to begin with, for fear of him giving any help, and then he jumped into the water, that was coming like a house on fire from Tim Osborne’s dam, and out of it he pulled Mother Marker, and the pretty young lady as had been in church.”
“Kit can swim,” said my Uncle shortly. “It is a very dangerous trick to learn, being bound to jump in, whenever any one is drowning. Did the women go in, for him to pull them out?”
“Ah, you never did think much of them, Mr. Corny; but you never had no inskin experience. Take ’em all round, they are pretty nigh as good as we are. But they never jumped in—no, you mustn’t say that. They were bound to go home, and they were doing of it, till the flood took their legs from under them. Mrs. Marker have been, this very morning, conversing along of my good missus, and was likely to stop when I was forced to come away, and you should hear her go on about your Kit! And nobody knows if she has any friends. I am told when her time comes to go to heaven, she will have the disposal of four hundred pounds.”
“You be off to your wife!” cried Uncle Corny; “Mrs. Marker is quite a young woman yet, but old enough to have discovered what men are. Go to your work, Rasp. I hate all gossip. But I am glad that Kit thrashed Sam Henderson.”
CHAPTER V.
A LITTLE TIFF.
Everybody knows, as he reads his newspaper, that nothing has ever yet happened in the world with enough of precision and accuracy to get itself described, by those who saw it, in the same, or in even a similar manner. No wonder then that my little adventure—if I have any right to call it mine—presented itself in many different lights, not only to the people among whom it spread, but even to the few who were present there and then. Mrs. Jenny Marker’s account of what had happened was already very grand that Sunday eve; but as soon as she had slept and dreamed upon it, her great command of words proved unequal to the call made at the same moment by the mind and heart. Everybody listened, for her practice was to pay every little bill upon a Monday morning; and almost everybody was convinced that she was right.
“Miraculous is the only word that I can think of,” she said to Mrs. Cutthumb, who sold tin-tacks and cabbages; “not a miracle only of the sandy desert, but of the places where the trees and waters grow.”
“The Jordan perhaps you means, Mrs. Marker, ma’am? Or did you please to have in your mind the Red Sea?”