set quite a while quiet, and then says he:

"Is that so, Curly?" says he.

"It certainly is," I answered him. "When a thing starts, till it's
settled you can't stop Old Man Wright. Sometimes he pays funeral
expenses," says I, "but when anybody gets on the prod with him I never
saw him show no sign of beginning to quit. He can't," says I; "none of
them Wrights can."

"Do you mean they're all that way, Curly?"

"The whole kit of 'em, me included," says I, "and the servants within
our gate, and our ox, and our hired girl, and all our hired men."

"Even the maidservant within your gates?" ast he of me.

"Shore!" says I. "Her especial and worst of any."

"But you don't take no hand in this war?" says he.

"That's just what I do," says I to him. "That's what a foreman's for.
You'd better plug up that hole and stay on your own side of the fence."

He set quiet for a time and then he says:

"I'm darned if I do!"

"Good-by, Jimmie," says I.

"Oh, shucks!" says he. "I'll see you from time to time."

I didn't make no answer but to put the bricks back in the hole on our
side.

Now for reasons of my own, not wanting to rile Old Man Wright, I didn't
say nothing to him about this hole in the fence. Neither did I say
anything to Bonnie Bell about the hired man having came back; because
she was doing right well the last day or so, brighter and more cheerful
than she had been. That, of course, was because of what Katherine'd told
her about her brother Tom. Any girl likes to hear about a young man
coming around, of course. Far as any of us could tell, Tom Kimberly
might be all right.

Bonnie Bell now, all at once, she taken to wanting to go on the lake
with her boat, and she insists our chauffore and her and me must go down
and fix up the boat. We didn't none of us like it especial, but she said
she hadn't been on the lake for so long she wanted to go once more
before it got too cold.

I didn't know nothing about boats, but sometimes I'd go down to the
boathouse and watch Bonnie Bell while she was tinkering with the engine
or something. One day I went down to the boathouse about the middle of
the afternoon, expecting to meet her out on the dock. All at once I hear
voices out there, one of them hers. I stopped then, wondering who could
of got on our dock.

There wasn't no way from the Wisners' yard to get on our dock now,
because the door into their boathouse had been nailed up. The wall run
clear down to their garrid