“It would be better for you to keep quiet,” Dick retorted.  “You ought to have your wages cut, coming around here after nine o’clock.  We ought to be out to the woods this minute.”

“’Taint no fault of mine that we haint,” said Bob, touching up his horses.

“Whose fault is it, if it isn’t yours?” Dick asked.

Clara Hooks was blushing.

“Let the sparrer tell who killed Cock Robin,” was Bob’s enigmatical reply.

“What’s he talking about?” said Julius Zink.

“I dunno, and he don’t either,” replied Dick.

“He doesn’t know that or anything else,” said Sarah Ketchum.

It was not possible for Sarah to hear a dispute and not become an open partisan.

“I know a lady when I see ’er,” said Bob.

“You don’t,” said Dick, warmly.  “You can’t parse horse.  I heard you try at school once.”

“I can curry him,” said Bob.

“You said horse was an article.”

“So he is, and a very useful harticle.”

One of the girls nudged her neighbor, and in a loud whisper intimated her opinion that Bob was getting the better of Dick.  At this Dick grew warmer and more boisterous, maintaining that the boys ought not to pay Bob the stipulated price since they were so late in starting.

“Hif folks haint ready I can’t ’elp it,” said Bob.

“Who wasn’t ready?” demanded Constance Faber.  “You didn’t wait for me, I know.”

“And you didn’t wait for me or Mat Snead,” added Sarah Ketchum, “because we walked down to meet the wagon.”

Clara Hooks’s face had grown redder and redder during the investigation; but if Clara was a put-offer, she was not a coward or a sneak.

“He waited for me,” she now said, “but I think it’s mean to tell it wherever he goes.”

“I haint told it nowheres.”

“You just the same as told; you hinted.”

“Wouldn’t ’ave ‘inted ef they hadn’t kept slappin’ at me,” was Bob’s defense, which did not go far toward soothing the mortified Clara.

Not all of this party were pert talkers.  Two were modest:  Valentine Duke and Mat Snead.  These sat together, forming what the others called the Quaker settlement, from the silence which prevailed in it.  The silence was now broken by a remark from Valentine Duke irrelevant to any preceding.

“Nuts are plentier at Hawley’s Grove than at Crow Roost,” he jerked, out, and then locked up again.

“Say we go there, then,” said Kit Pott.

“Let’s take the vote on it.  Those in favor of Hawley’s say aye.”

The ayes came storming out, as though each was bound to be the first and loudest.

“Contrary, no,” continued the self-made president; and Bob Trotter voted solidly “No!”

“We didn’t ask you to vote,” said Dick, returning to his quarrel.

Dick was constitutionally and habitually pugnacious, but he had such a cordial way of forgiving everybody he injured that people couldn’t stay mad with him.  Indeed, he was quite a favorite.