Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/269

 back for it, next day, there was her butter, coated with about half an inch o' limestone. How I come to know about that was b'cause she went to Pop and said I 'd hooked her butter and gone and chucked a stone down in the pail, just because she 'd stopped me doin' my Spanish bull-baitin' act with their heifer. Well, the funniest part about all this here rumpus was that she slung that stone away, and about a week later old man Johnson gathered it up for the new chimney he was buildin'. Now, maybe you kids won't believe it, but that stone was built right in the new fireplace. That night when they were havin' a kind of a house-warmin' or something like that, the heat from the burnin' logs bust the stone, and, gee whittaker, down runs about six pounds o' grease. It puzzled old man Johnson a good deal, and I had a talk with him about it, and we both decided if there was one stone in that neighborhood bearin' oil, there ought to be a heap more. So old Johnson, he went around for about a week, with a hand-drill, tappin' about every old hard-head on the farm!"

Lonely seemed to chuckle inwardly over the memory of it all, murmuring placidly to