“What night?” says I, because I had forgotten. “Doll-cab and l-l-lullaby.” I can’t write lullaby the way he stuttered it, and if I could I wouldn’t. It would waste almost as much paper as he did with his figuring. He put more than seven hunderd “l’s” into it. “Huh!” says I, not much pleased about it, and who would be, I’d like to know? “Say, Plunk,” says Mark, “I t-t-tell you what I’ll do. I’ll let you off this time. It’ll teach you not to bet. Bettin’s a m-m-mighty bad habit for a young f-f-feller like you.” “An old man like you,” says I, sarcastic as vinegar, “is all right, though.” “Sure,” says he, with a grin, “but I’ll let you off.” “Would you ’a’ done what you agreed to if you lost the bet?” “Yes,” says he. “Then,” says I, “so will I. When I say I’ll do a thing, I’ll do it.” He looked at me for a minute and then he just sort of touched me on the shoulder and says: “I might ’a’ knowed you’d say that. I’ve b-b-been in enough things with you to know you wasn’t a q-q-quitter. When I see you hikin’ around with that doll-cab to-night, hanged if I won’t be _proud_ I know you.” Yes, sir, he said that to me, and he said it like he meant it. Somehow after that I didn’t care who laughed at me when I was making an idiot of myself. I felt _good_. And right there I made up my mind to one thing: It’s a heap better to look like an idiot on account of keeping your word than it would be to look like a college perfessor by breaking it. All the week that man Amassa P. Wiggamore had been hanging around town. As I said, he was the first man we saw when we got off the train from Bostwick. He didn’t come near us, though, but he spent a heap of time talking to folks, and Mark said he saw him coming out of the bank two or three times. Then we heard a rumor that the Power Company had bought up a lot of land up above town a few miles—farms that bordered on the river along the bluffs—and that it was planning to have a big storage reservoir there four or five miles long and a couple of miles wide, a regular lake. It was going to store water there during the spring freshets and the rainy season and then let it run down the river when the dry months come along and the river wasn’t anything but a trickle. It was to give an even flow of water the whole year around so he would have it to turn his turbine water-wheels and manufacture electricity. “Um!” says Mark. “Looks to me like he was figurin’ on that l-l-lake comin’ about to us. L-looks like he was plannin’ to have his big dam right where our dam is.” “How kin he?” says I. “He can’t,” says Mark, and his jaw set so you would have thought he was biting something. “He can’t unless he pays our price for this mill.” “If he can’t git this place, where else kin he build his dam?” “I don’t know,” says Mark, “b-b-but I’m goin’ to f-f-find out.”