nty men at a time. But it ain't in natur' for
one man to whip twenty."

"I never said once in my life that I whipped twenty men at a time,"
protested Jim Hart.

"We'll let it pass," said Paul, "and Sol may be right about the Greeks
piling it up for themselves; but so they wrote it, and so we have to take
it. Well, Alexander, although he wasn't much more than a boy, kept on
whipping the Persians until at last their king, Darius, ran away with his
wives."

Shif'less Sol whistled.

"Do you mean to tell me, Paul," he said, "that any white man ever had more
than one wife! I thought only Injun chiefs had 'em?"

"Why, it was common a long time ago," replied Paul.

"What a waste!" said Shif'less Sol. "One man havin' a lot uv wives, an'
Jim Hart here ain't ever been able to get a single one."

"An' you ain't, either, Sol Hyde," said Jim Hart.

"Oh, me!" replied Shif'less Sol carelessly. "I'm too young to marry."

"Let him go on about Alexander, the fightin' feller," interrupted Tom
Ross.

"Alexander conquered all Asia," resumed Paul, "but it didn't agree with
him. The more he conquered the more he wanted to conquer."

"Jest like a little boy eatin' turkey," said Shif'less Sol. "Can't hold
enough to suit him. Stummick ain't ez big ez his appetite, an' he hez to
cry about it. I don't think your Alexander wuz such a big man, after all."

"He was not, from one point of view, Sol, but he was certainly a general.
After conquering all the world, he fell to drinking too much, and
quarreling with his best friends. One day he got raging drunk, which made
him hot all over, and he jumped into an icy river to cool off. That gave
him a fever, and he died right away. He was only thirty-two."

Shif'less Sol sniffed in disgust.

"Dead at thirty-two!" he said. "Now, I call him a plumb failure. With
fightin' goin' on all the time, an' fevers layin' aroun' fur you, I call
it somethin' jest to live, an' I mean to stay in these parts till I'm a
hundred. Why, that Alexander never had time, Paul, to think over what he'd
done. I wouldn't change places with him, I think I'm a heap sight better
off."

"I agrees with Sol ag'in," said Tom Ross, who had been in deep thought.
"In dang'rous times it's doin' a heap jest to live, an' a man who dies
off at thirty-two, all through his own foolishness, ain't much to brag
about."

Henry laughed.

"Paul," he said, "you'll have to bring out better examples of greatness to
satisfy Sol and Tom."