“I’ll give you half a dollar.”
“No, he ain’t for sale.”
“Give you a dollar for him,” said the man, but I didn’t wait to have any more talk with him. I started back for our cottage.
Mr. Edwin Skreever was still walking up and down the porch and I sat down on the rocks. Wampus stood a minute or so, and then he reached into his pocket and took out a nail. He had a pocket half full of old, rusty nails he had knocked out of old driftwood—old iron nails, all sizes.
“Look here, Mr. Skreever,” he said, “can you do this?”
He took the nail, flat, between his thumb and two first fingers and threw it as hard as he could out over the river, making it spin, and it sang as it went. Whine is a better word; it whined like a guitar string when you pick it and then run your thumb up it.
“Did you ever hear anybody make a nail sing like that?” Wampus asked.
“Yes,” said Mr. Edwin Skreever, “I have. I have heard that before. And I cannot imagine why it is a boy delights in throwing away perfectly good nails for the mere satisfaction of hearing them make a useless noise. You may wish, some day, that you had not thrown away that nail.”
“Aw!” Wampus said.
“It is a useless and uncalled-for waste,” said Mr. Edwin Skreever. “Nails cost money. Nails cost labor and time. A miner must dig the iron ore, and another miner must dig coal, and laborers must turn the ore into iron and fashion the nails from the iron. Salesmen must go out and sell the nails, railroads must carry them, other salesmen must sell them again. And you throw them into the river! Why? What good does it do you?”
Wampus just said “Aw!” again, because he did not know what else to say, and I thought I was gladder than ever that I wasn’t going to marry Mr. Edwin Skreever. I was glad he was going to live in Derlingport and not in Riverbank. I don’t like fellows that lecture you when you throw away an old rusty nail. So I said to Wampus:
“Let’s eat a muskmelon.”
Well, all summer we had had a pile of muskmelons and watermelons under the cottage. They’re cheap and whenever we wanted to eat one we did. We used to get them by the skiff load. We would sit on the ripraps and eat and throw the rinds into the river, and the yellow-jacket hornets would come by the hundreds and pile all over any rinds that did not fall in the river. They would crowd onto any juice that fell on the rocks, and they would light on the very piece you were eating. There were lots of yellow-jackets, but nobody minded them. If they got in the way we flicked them off with a finger.
But there is one queer thing about yellow-jackets. They will buzz around and fly around all summer and never sting you unless, perhaps, you step on one with your bare foot, but there comes a day sooner or later when every yellow-jacket everywhere gets hopping mad. All the yellow-jackets for miles around go crazy on the same day. Maybe they all go crazy at the same hour of the same day—or the same minute—I don’t know. Anyway, this was the day. September 10th was the day the yellow-jackets quit being calm and gentle that year and began to be angry and go around with chips on their shoulders looking for a fight. So the first yellow-jacket Wampus flicked off him swore a blue streak in yellow-jacket language and buzzed in a circle to get up speed and banged right into Wampus’s neck. Zingo!
Wampus made one jump and grabbed his cap and slashed at the air and in a minute a dozen yellow-jackets were on the warpath. The next one to sting went at Rover’s nose like a shot out of a rifle. We heard poor Rover give one wild Yeowp! and he jumped about six feet in the air and when he came down he was already running. He went out of sight down the path, making about twenty feet at each jump and “yeowping” at the top of his voice, and his “yeowps” grew fainter and fainter. Mr. Edwin Skreever laughed, but I stood still, just holding my hat ready to swat any yellow-jacket that came too near me.
“Come on!” I said to Wampus, “let’s get away from here. It’s stinging time.”
So we gathered up the rest of our muskmelons and got away from there as quietly as we could. We went up to his cottage, which was all boarded up, and sat on the step.
Well, about six o’clock Orpheus Cadwallader came down from his shack to get our supper for us. He brought a spring chicken and fried it and we had a good supper, and then Wampus and I went out front. We fooled around awhile and Mr. Edwin Skreever lighted the lamp and wrote some letters or his will or something. It was none of our business what he wrote. Orpheus Cadwallader washed the dishes and then came out and said he was going to row down to town, and he went off in his skiff.
Then, presently, Wampus said:
“Where’s Rover?”
“Gosh!” I said, “I bet he’s wandering!”
“We’d better find him,” Wampus said, and I knew that was so.
I thought I knew where he would be, over back by the slough where there were some dogfish on the shore that would never swim again.
Mr. Edwin Skreever came out on the porch.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Rover ran away,” I said. “We’ve got to find him.”
“Oh, drat you and your Rover!” he said. “Didn’t May tell you not to let that dog run away? You certainly do aggravate me! For two cents I would go down to town now and be quit of your foolishness.”
I did not say anything but Wampus did.
“Why don’t you go, then?” he asked.
