"Honest," I says, "I don't know. I guess it was because I wanted you to think I was fun."
He looked at me for a minute, straight and deep.
"By Jove!" he says, and I didn't know what ailed him. "Have you had breakfast?" he ask', short.
"No," I says.
"You come in here with me and get some," he says, like an order.
He led the way into the yard of the Dew Drop Inn. There's a grape arbor there, and some bare hard dirt, and two or three tables. Nobody was there, only the boy, sweeping the dirt with a broom. We sat down at the table in the arbor. It was pleasant to be there. A house wren was singing his head off somewhere near. A woman come out and sloshed water on the stone at the back door and begun scrubbing. A clock in the bar struck six.
Joe Burkey, that keeps the Inn, come out and nodded to me.
"Joe," I says, "did Keddie Bingy come back here?"
Joe wiped his hands on the cloth on his arm, and then brushed his mustache with it, and then wiped off the table with it.