“But I aint Jubiter Dunlap. I’d just as soon tell you who I am, though, if you’ll swear to keep mum, for I ain’t no Phillips, either.” 

 Tom says: 

 “We’ll keep mum, but there ain’t any need to tell who you are if you ain’t Jubiter Dunlap.” 

 “Why?” 

 “Because if you ain’t him you’re t’other twin, Jake. You’re the spit’n image of Jubiter.” 

 “Well, I’m Jake. But looky here, how do you come to know us Dunlaps?” 

 Tom told about the adventures we’d had down there at his uncle Silas’s last summer, and when he see that there warn’t anything about his folks—or him either, for that matter—that we didn’t know, he opened out and talked perfectly free and candid. He never made any bones about his own case; said he’d been a hard lot, was a hard lot yet, and reckoned he’d be a hard lot plumb to the end. He said of course it was a dangerous life, and—He give a kind of gasp, and set his head like a person that’s listening. We didn’t say anything, and so it was very still for a second or so, and there warn’t no sounds but the screaking of the woodwork and the chug-chugging of the machinery down below. 

 Then we got him comfortable again, telling him about his people, and how Brace’s wife had been dead three years, and Brace wanted to marry Benny and she shook him, and Jubiter was working for Uncle Silas, and him and Uncle Silas quarreling all the time—and then he let go and laughed. 

 “Land!” he says, “it’s like old times to hear all this tittle-tattle, and does me good. It’s been seven years and more since I heard any. How do they talk about me these days?” 

 “Who?” 

 “The farmers—and the family.” 

 “Why, they don’t talk about you at all—at least only just a mention, once in a long time.” 

 “The nation!” he says, surprised; “why is that?” 

 “Because they think you are dead long ago.” 

 Prev. P 7/54 next