It was easy to find Mr. Macmillan. Everybody seemed to know him. His
office was up over the bank. When we got there he was in, but at first
he didn’t recognize us.
“D-don’t you remember the boys you m-met while you was f-f-fishin’ a
week ago?”
“Of course,” says he. “Of course I do. Sit right down and tell me what I
can do for you.”
“This is Mister Hieronymous Alphabet Bell,” says Mark. “He’s B-Binney
Jenks’s uncle.”
“Glad to know you, Mr. Bell,” says Mr. Macmillan. “I hope you’re well.”
Uncle answered him in poetry:
“I got my health; I got my breath,
But I’m clost to bein’ s’prised to death.”
Mr. Macmillan’s face twitched like he wanted to laugh, but he didn’t. He
was as polite as could be.
“What’s the cause of the surprise, Mr. Bell?”
“You tell him,” says uncle to Mark. “I hain’t got so’s I can speak yet.”
Mark told all about it, while Mr. Macmillan’s eyes got bigger and bigger
and more and more astonished.
“You don’t mean to tell me you boys worked all this out just from seeing
a letter, and that you outwitted those two men? It doesn’t come within
the bounds of possibility.”
“Everything I s-said,” says Mark, sort of dignified, “we did.”
“I beg your pardon,” says Mr. Macmillan. “I didn’t doubt your word, of
course. But it’s so remarkable. You are remarkable boys.”
I shook my head. “Mark’s a remarkable boy,” says I. “All I did was come
along.”
Mr. Macmillan shook his head. “You both deserve a lot of credit. As for
me, I’m proud I know you. Now let’s get down to business. What are you
going to do about it all?”
“We d-d-don’t know,” says Mark. “That’s why we came to you.”
Mr. Macmillan turned and looked at his desk. For fifteen minutes he
thought it over, and then he says, “I guess we better have a talk with
Jiggins & Co. Can you find them?”
“I guess so,” I says. “I’ll go and see.”
I hustled right over to the hotel, and there, in the office, sat Jiggins
and Collins, looking pretty glum, I can tell you. I went straight up to
them.
“Mr. Macmillan wants to know if you’ll please come up to his office,”
says I.
Jiggins began to sing his funny little tune. “Tum-a-diddle,
dum-a-diddle, dum-a-diddle-dee,” and so on. Then he smiled sort of
sickly.
“Well, Binney,” says he, “you beat, after all, didn’t you?”
“Mark Tidd comes pretty close to beatin’ every time,” I says.
“Yes,” says Jiggins, “I expect he does. Looks like he would. Wonderful
boy. Knew he was wonderful all the time. Liked him. Still like him.
Always will like him. No hard feelings. Not a one. Don’t hold a thing up
against him.”
“That’s good,” says I, “because Mark and I don’t hold no grudge against
you and Mr. Collins. You wasn’t doin’ right, but maybe that wasn’t your
fault. Maybe you wasn’t taught jest proper. You’re the pleasantest
villains I ever knew.”
At that both Collins and Jiggins laughed. “First time I ever thought of
myself as a villain,” says Collins.
“Who’s Mr. Macmillan?” says Jiggins.
“He’s our lawyer.”
“Oh,” says Jiggins, and he laughed again, but this time it was a pale
sort of laugh. “You don’t let grass grow under your feet.”
“Not when we’re fussin’ with you, Mr. Jiggins,” says I, meaning a
compliment.
He took it that way, and smiled like he was pleased.
“Will you come?” I asked him.
“To be sure. Why not? Nothing else to do. Got to bargain now. Cost more
money. Ugh! Hate to think how much.”
We went right up to Mr. Macmillan’s office, and I introduced Collins and
Jiggins to him.
“Who are you acting for?” asked Mr. Macmillan.
“The United States Copper Company,” says Jiggins.
“Have you authority to make an agreement on this matter?”
“Yes,” says Jiggins.
“Well,” says Mr. Macmillan, “I’ve thought this over, and I guess a
royalty on tonnage will be the best plan for Mr. Bell.”
“What’s a royalty on t-t-tonnage?” asked Mark.
“It means that the company will pay Mr. Bell a certain amount for every
ton of copper it takes out of his mine.”
Mark nodded his head.
“That would be most satisfactory to us,” says Jiggins.
Then they went to arguing and dickering and talking and talking for
hours, it seemed. Then Mr. Macmillan called in his stenographer and
dictated an agreement to her. The agreement read that the company was to
pay to Uncle Hieronymous or his heirs three thousand dollars every year
for fifty years. They were to pay that much at the very least. That was
what Mr. Macmillan called a minimum. Mark saved up that word. But uncle
might get more. If the company took out so much copper that the
royalties came to more than three thousand dollars a year, uncle would
get whatever it was. He might get nothing but the three thousand dollars
every year, and then, again, he might get ten or twenty times as much.
Uncle Hieronymous sat like he was dreaming. Every once in a while he’d
break out with some sort of an exclamation like “Shucks!” or “Ginger!”
or “I swanny!”
The agreement was written after a while.
“You send this to be signed by the proper officers of your company,”
says Mr. Macmillan. “When it comes back with the three thousand dollars
for the first year Mr. Bell will sign, too. Then the matter will be
settled.”
Well, Jiggins sent the contract to his company, and they signed it and
sent back the money. That fixed it so Uncle Hieronymous was rich. Think
of it! Three thousand dollars every year, and maybe more! He couldn’t
get used to it, and kept saying he didn’t know what to do with it and it
would be a burden to him. Mark told him he’d find ways to use it and he
needn’t worry.
How proud he was of Mark and me! He never stopped talking about us and
what we did and making poems about it. One of the poems I remember. It
said:
“Oh, Binney Jenks and Marcus Tidd,
It beats the dickens what you did!”
Now, isn’t that a dandy compliment?
Well, when everything was settled we said good-by to Mr. Macmillan and
to Collins and Jiggins. They had got over their disappointment and were
quite pleasant again. They came down to the depot to see us off, and
Jiggins gave both of us a jack-knife. They were dandies, too, with a
corkscrew, a hammer, a saw, a glass-cutter, a file, and lots of other
tools in them.
We shook hands all around, and somehow I was sorry to see the last of
them. They were the pleasantest enemies in the world. Then the train
started off, and we were on our way to Baldwin again.
My! but Tallow and Plunk were glad to see us, and Martha and Mary were
so tickled to see Uncle Hieronymous they almost scared him to death. He
hired a man to go and drive Alfred back from the farm where he’d left
him.
We boys stayed with him a whole month, and I want to tell you we had the
best time ever. It was a lot better than it would have been, because all
the while we were so glad we had helped to make Uncle Hieronymous rich.
At last we had to start for home, and uncle drove us to the train behind
Alfred. He was most crying when he said good-by, but he promised to come
and see us a long time next winter. The last thing he said was a poem.
“I do admire Marcus Tidd.
He surely is the smartest kid.”
And Tallow and Plunk and I agreed with him. Don’t you think so, too?
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's Mark Tidd in the Backwoods, by Clarence B. Kelland