“It hain’t l-like this was jest _our_ fight,” says he. “It’s everybody’s
f-fight. If real big b-business men will stand for doin’s like
Wiggamore’s I want to know it. The mill and our b-business is little and
don’t amount to m-much. We’re goin’ to f-f-fight for somethin’ bigger.
It’s what folks call the p-principle.”
“Jest so it’s a fight,” says I, “I don’t care if it’s for a bag of
peanuts.”
“You would if you t-thought about it,” says he, sort of solemn. And when
I got home I did think about it, and somehow I come to see that he was
right and that fighting for a principle is about the biggest thing a
fellow can do.... Only, he wants to be sure he’s got a regular principle
to fight for.
CHAPTER XIX
You can bet we all caught the one-o’clock train, and we enjoyed the ride
to the city, for all that we were going on such important business, and
for all of the fact that none of us had the least idea in the world what
we were going to do but Mark. He knew. You could tell by the way he
acted that he knew exactly, and was going to do it or bust. There was
just one surprise, and that was that Amassa P. Wiggamore got on the same
train. He didn’t see us, because he rode in the parlor-car and we rode
in the regular coach. Mark said he judged we’d see more of him before we
got back home again. We did.
When we got to the city we went to the hotel we knew about and got two
rooms, and then we had supper and walked around a little, looking in
windows and at folks on the street, and had a bully time. Mark set a
record for eating peanuts. He got away with three bags between seven
o’clock and nine, when we went to bed, and they were good big bags, too.
Each of us ate a bag, but he said it was his duty to eat just as much as
we did, so he had to have one for each of us.
He woke us up in the morning, and saw to it that when we dressed we
fixed up special and neat, because he let on that when you were going to
see big business men it made a heap of difference how you looked and
whether they got a good impression of you right off. He made me tie my
tie three times, and Binney had to comb his hair over, and Tallow had to
shine up his shoes. I got kind of scared on account of making such
preparations as that. I tell you things are pretty serious when a fellow
has to be as fussy as Mark seemed to be.
Anyhow, he got us dressed to suit him, and then we had breakfast, and
then we started out to an address that Mark had found out before he left
Wicksville. We walked, and it was quite a ways, but we knew there wasn’t
any use getting there too early. Our experience with the railroad men
proved that. We figured we would get there about nine o’clock, which we
did. But that was too early, so we went for another walk and got back at
ten.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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