Part 37

"Your fence? It's our fence. Don't I know all about it? It was a damn shame, Curly."

"What business is it of yours?" says I to him.

"Well, I hate to see the family I work for make such fools of theirselfs." He was setting up close to the wall now, looking through. He went on talking: "If I put the bricks in again on my side, and you on yours, who'll know the hole's there?"

"We've got ivy on our side," says I. "It's green and 'most to the top of the wall. But I don't know now why you broke that hole through."

"Curly," says he, "I want to let Peanut through, so's he can have a good friendly fight with my dog once in a while. Sometimes I'll pull some of the bricks out. I reckon Peanut'll do the rest."

"Peanut'll not do no more visiting," says I; "and I've got orders not to have any sort of truck with anyone on your side of the fence."

He set quite a while quiet, and then says he:

"Is that so, Curly?" says he.

"It certainly is," I answered him. "When a thing starts, till it's settled you can't stop Old Man Wright. Sometimes he pays funeral expenses," says I, "but when anybody gets on the prod with him I never saw him show no sign of beginning to quit. He can't," says I; "none of them Wrights can."

"Do you mean they're all that way, Curly?"

"The whole kit of 'em, me included," says I, "and the servants within our gate, and our ox, and our hired girl, and all our hired men."

"Even the maidservant within your gates?" ast he of me.

"Shore!" says I. "Her especial and worst of any."

"But you don't take no hand in this war?" says he.

"That's just what I do," says I to him. "That's what a foreman's for. You'd better plug up that hole and stay on your own side of the fence."

He set quiet for a time and then he says:

"I'm darned if I do!"

"Good-by, Jimmie," says I.

"Oh, shucks!" says he. "I'll see you from time to time."

I didn't make no answer but to put the bricks back in the hole on our side.

Now for reasons of my own, not wanting to rile Old Man Wright, I didn't say nothing to him about this hole in the fence. Neither did I say anything to Bonnie Bell about the hired man having came back; because she was doing right well the last day or so, brighter and more cheerful than she had been. That, of course, was because of what Katherine'd told her about her brother Tom. Any girl likes to hear about a young man coming around, of course. Far as any of us could tell, Tom Kimberly might be all right.

Bonnie Bell now, all at once, she taken to wanting to go on the lake with her boat, and she insists our chauffore and her and me must go down and fix up the boat. We didn't none of us like it especial, but she said she hadn't been on the lake for so long she wanted to go once more before it got too cold.

I didn't know nothing about boats, but sometimes I'd go down to the boathouse and watch Bonnie Bell while she was tinkering with the engine or something. One day I went down to the boathouse about the middle of the afternoon, expecting to meet her out on the dock. All at once I hear voices out there, one of them hers. I stopped then, wondering who could of got on our dock.

There wasn't no way from the Wisners' yard to get on our dock now, because the door into their boathouse had been nailed up. The wall run clear down to their garridge, and their garridge faced onto the boathouse, which was lower down. The only way anybody could get on our dock from their place was to get in a boat and come round from the lake. Then it would of been easy.

I said I heard Bonnie Bell's voice. She was talking; who she was talking to, I didn't know.

"It's all wrong!" says she. "You are presuming too much. Of course I pulled you out of the lake--I would anybody; but your employers are not friends of ours. Even if they were you've no right in the world to speak to me."

Then I heard another voice. I knew it was Jimmie, their hired man. He spoke out and I heard him plain.

"I know I haven't," says he, "none in the world; but I've got to."