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She is fifteen and should have known better, but the people of our valley are dreadfully frank sometimes, and this girl spoke in the clear, sharp voice of truth that cut through one. Perry turned quick as a flash and eyed me. For a moment all I could do was to thump the floor and cry "Order! Silence! Lulu Ann Nummler, when you want to speak, you must hold up three fingers."
"See what you've done!" he snapped angrily, brushing away the sparks. "I didn't notice you was in the middle of a word, Elmer, really I didn't," pleaded old Mr. Nummler. "I wasn't in the middle of a word," retorted Elmer, as he drove his little finger into his pipe in an effort to save some of the tobacco. "I was just beginnin' a new piece.
Isaac Bolum declares every day that he is going to, but when the time comes he breaks down. Every other means of finding out has been taken." "Josiah Nummler told me to-day he believed Weston was a detective." "That was Elmer Spiker's theory. But, as Theop says, who is he detecting?"
Not till she turned away did I finish. "Do you know," I went on, "last night when I saw you, I thought we must have met before, and I thought if I had met you anywhere before, it must have been in Heaven." I had expected that at a time like this Josiah Nummler would appear. In that I was disappointed.
He pointed at Henry Holmes with his thumb. "Sech as his." "Yes," said Josiah Nummler, "we have sech le-gends, comin' mostly from the Indians and Henery Holmes. But there's one I got from my pap when I was a boy, and I allus thought it one of the most be-yutiful fairy stories I ever heard of course exceptin' them in the Bible.
Why at a time like this I should be treated as a subject of so much distinction was a puzzle, and I was about to demand an explanation, when Josiah Nummler interrupted. "It's true," he said. "Teachers ain't changed and the boys ain't changed.
Theophilus Jones raised himself from the counter on which he was leaning, and waved a lighted candle above his head. "Here comes the teacher make way for the teacher!" Josiah Nummler pounded the floor with his long pole. "See the conquerin' hero comes," he cried. "A place for him a place for him!"
Now the footfalls were light. And Mary came! But how could I look careless and dashing, with Josiah Nummler in the chair I had fixed so close to mine? Rising, I bowed as awkwardly as possible. I insisted on her taking my own rocker, while I fixed myself on the floor with a pillar for a back-rest. Not a word did the girl say, but she sat there clutching the little basket she held in her lap.
The poor child didn't understand why Teacher Thomas should stare so at her, and she let out one long, unending bleat. This gave me a chance to send Lulu Ann Nummler out of the room in charge of the infant, and I rested easier when Perry drew his Prince Albert around him once more and spoke. A grand figure Perry would have made in Tantallion's towers.
"I understood from your original account that he died in battle." "I tho't so too, Henery," put in Isaac Bolum. "You misled me, complete. 'Here, says I, 'at last I have met a man who has licked the teacher. And all the time you was tellin' about it, we was admirin' you Joe Nummler and me and now we finds Gil Spoonholler lived fifty-seven year after that terrible struggle."
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