"Certain? Come right over here to that ranch, and have a drink, and I'll show you, so's you can't be mistaken. I tell you, I'm solid as a rock with him."
一本一道咪咪曰本久草
"Here, Corporal; I want you. I've got a great lark. Our Secret Service people report a bad lodge of the Knights of the Golden Circle out here in the country that threatens to make trouble. It is made up of local scalawags and runaway rebels from Kentucky and Tennessee. They have a regular lodge-room in a log house out in the woods, which they have fixed up into a regular fort, and they hold their meetings at nights, with pickets thrown out, and no end of secrecy and mystery. The General thinks that they are some of the old counterfeiting, horse-stealing gang that infested the country, and are up to their old tricks. But it may be that they are planning wrecking a train, burning bridges and the like. They've got so bold that the Sheriff and civil officials are afraid of them, and don't dare go near them. I've persuaded the General to let me take out a squad and jump them. Want to go along?""Have you bit it off, or did some girl, that you bolted off in such a hurry to see, drain you so dry o' talk that you haint got a word left? Who is she? What does she look like? What made you in sich a dreadful hurry to see her? You didn't go clear up to Bad Ax, did you, and kill that old widower?"
ONE:"You're wrong," said the medical-minded Alf Russell. "You ought to have less than the others, because you're smaller. The littler and younger the person the smaller the dose, always.""You think not?" The face was still.
WHAT days those were that followed the arrival of the boys home. In Shorty's hard, rough life he had never so much as dreamed of such immaculate housekeeping as Mrs. Klegg's. He had hardly been in speaking distance of such women as Si's mother and sisters. To see these bright, blithe, sweet-speeched women moving about the well-ordered house in busy performance of their duties was a boundless revelation to him. It opened up a world of which he had as little conception as of a fairy realm. For the first time he began to understand things that Si had told him of his home, yet it meant a hundredfold more to him than to Si, for Si had been brought up in that home. Shorty began to regard the Deacon and Si as superior beings, and to stand in such awe of Mrs. Klegg and the girls that he became as tongue-tied as a bashful school-boy in their presence. It amazed him to hear Si, when the girls would teaze him, speak to them as sharply as brothers sometimes will, and just as if they were ordinary mortals."It was the Star of Bethlehem."Norma hesitated for a second. Then she burst out: "But they're so far away! I meanthere isn't any reason why they should really care. They're busy with their own lives, and I don't really see why whatever's done here should occupy them"Norma took a deep breath. "I'm sorry," she said at last. "I'll try to give you what you want"THE time and the surroundings were such as to bring the spirits of the boys to their lowest ebb."And so you got the other one," Si started to say to his partner, but then he remembered Shorty's "flarin' up," and held his tongue.