Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/314

 "He-he-he! Do I mind em, Henery; do I mind 'em? Well, now, I guess I ain't forgittin' them doin's! An' d' you mind the time we captured little Katie Wilson, and were a-goin' to hold her for ransom? He-he-he!"

"That was a powerful energetic wallopin' old man Wilson was a-givin' us for it, too!"

There was a silence, and a song-sparrow sang thinly from one of the far-off maples.

"D' you mind, Silas, what a purty girl Katie was, them days?"

Cap'n Sands's hands were under the tail of his alpaca coat, and he sneezed boisterously.

"Yes, an uncommon purty girl, Katie! An' dead this twenty years, Henery, dead this twenty years!"

"You come and cut me out there, you old dog! Mind how she got mifty, 'bout my sayin' she was a purty poor-lookin' captive and ought to spruce up and wash some o' that taffy off'n her face!

"Mind, too, how she got just a leetle scart, first, when we captured her and were a-tellin' her she was goin' to be held for ransom? And what a power o' bawlin' she did a-fore we started feedin' her on horehound taffy?"