Mark Tidd wasn’t given much to exercise, but that isn’t saying he
couldn’t stir around spry if there was some good reason. He never
wanted to play baseball or tag or anything where you had to run, and
usually when a game was going on he’d be lying under a tree reading
a book. He said it was a lot easier reading about a game than
playing it, and more interesting than watching the kind we played.
He read a good deal, anyhow, mostly, I guess, because you can sit so
still to do it, and rest at the same time if you want to; and it was
surprising the things he got to know about that were useful to us.
Seemed like almost everything we wanted to do Mark would have read
about some better way of doing it, and that’s how we came to get up
the K. K. K., which stands for Ku Klux Klan.
We were all sitting in Tidd’s yard where the shade of the barn fell,
and nobody had said anything for quite a spell. I was beginning to
want to do something, and it was easy to see that Plunk and Binney
were wriggling around uneasy like; but Mark he lay with his little
eyes shut tight, looking as peaceful and satisfied as a turtle on a
log. All of a sudden the idea popped into my head, and I yelled
right out, “Let’s git up a secret society.”
Mark opened one eye and sort of blinked at me, and Plunk and Binney
sat up straight.
“What’ll we call it?” Binney wanted to know.
“Who’ll be officers?” Plunk asked.
“I dunno,” I says, sharp like, because they seemed to think I ought
to have the whole thing planned out for them to do without their
lifting a hand.
Mark rubbed his eyes and rolled over on his side. “What’s the main
thing about a s-secret society?” he asks.
“Payin’ dues,” I says, quick.
“Havin’ somethin’ to eat,” Binney guessed.
“Naw,” Mark grunts, contemptuous. “The main thing about a secret
society is the s-s-secret.”
We could see in a minute that he was right about that.
“So,” he went on, “if we’re goin’ to have a secret society the first
thing is to git a s-s-secret to have.”
“I don’t know no secret,” Binney said, shaking his head hard.
“Nor me,” said Plunk.
I thought a minute, because I knew a couple of secrets, but they
were secrets I didn’t calculate to tell anybody, least of all Mark
and Plunk and Binney; so I just shook my head, too.
“We’ll make a secret,” Mark told us.
“How?” I wanted to know, because I didn’t see how you could go to
work to make a secret, but I might have known Mark would find a way.
“Did you ever hear of the K-k-k-ku K-k-k-klux K-k-k-klan?”
“What?” I asked.
He said it over again.
“I didn’t git it that time,” I told him. “Sounds like a tongue-tied
hen tryin’ to cackle.”
Mark sort of scowled at me and did it all over, but not one of us
could make a thing of it.
“Write it,” I said; “that’s the only way we’ll ever git it.”
At first he wasn’t going to do it, but we argued with him that it
wasn’t any use spoiling a good thing like a secret society just
because he couldn’t mention plain a name he wanted to tell us; so at
last he wrote it down on a piece of paper. What he wrote was Ku Klux
Klan.
“It don’t make no sense,” Binney said. “What language is it, anyhow?
Dutch?”
“It ain’t no language. It’s a name.”
“Oh.”
“Of the most p-p-powerful secret society that ever was.”
“I reckon it was over in Russia or somewheres. It sounds like it.”
“It was right here in the United States.”
“Hum,” I said, because that name didn’t sound a bit like the United
States to me.
“It was after the war.”
“The Spanish War?”
“No. The North and South war.”
“Oh.... That one. What was it for?”
“For protection. They went ridin’ around at night rightin’ wrongs
and scarin’ folks and runnin’ things in general. They wore white
sheets over their heads.”
“Gee. Honest?”
“It’s in the histories.”
“And it was secret?”
“The most secret thing ever was. Even men in it didn’t know who one
another was.”
“Let’s have one,” Plunk yelled, squirming around like he was sitting
on an ant’s nest. “I kin git a sheet.”
“Who’s goin’ to b’long?” I said; and then we all looked at one
another.
“Nobody but us four,” Binney whispers, because he’s beginning to
feel secret already. There wasn’t any argument to that, so we agreed
to be a Ku Klux Klan, and to have our secret meeting-place in a
little cave up across from the island where the swimming-hole was.
It wasn’t much of a cave. Just a little round room dug out of the
hill by somebody a long time ago. I couldn’t stand up straight in
it, and when we four was all inside there wasn’t much room left—not
with Mark Tidd taking up the space he did.
Well, each of us got a sheet and hid it there, and we kept potatoes
to bake and an old frying-pan and a kettle and other things like
that in case of emergency, for there was no knowing what might come
up with an organization like ours, and we knew we had to be ready.
Mark made up passwords and grips and secret signs; and we had an
alphabet all of our own that we could write letters to one another
in, which was fine, even though there never seemed to be anything
very secret to write. But there come to be later on, and there was a
time when we was glad of the cave and the potatoes and the
frying-pan. But that wasn’t until the next spring, and lots of
things happened before then.
I guess maybe it was a month after we organized the Klan when the
stranger came to town. We were cooking dinner up at the cave that
day—a black bass, four perch, and a couple of blue-gills, with baked
potatoes—and we were just scouring the dishes with sand when we
looked down and saw Uncle Ike Bond come ambling along the river.
Uncle Ike drove the bus when it was necessary and fished the rest of
the time, which was most of the time; and he caught fish, too; lots
of them. I guess he got a good many on night lines.
Binney Jenks yelled down at Uncle Ike, and he looked up to see who
it was. When he recognized Mark Tidd he sat down sort of tired on a
log and motioned for us to come. He was a great friend of Mark’s
since the day the Tidds moved to town; and he let on to folks that
Mark was the smartest boy in Wicksville, which I wouldn’t be
surprised if he was.
We all went down the hill, three of us running, and Mark panting
along behind and puffing and snorting.
“Expectin’ any visitors?” Uncle Ike asked of Mark.
“No,” said Mark, and sat down.
“Um!” grunted Uncle Ike.
He pulled out his pipe and fussed at it with his jack-knife before
he filled it and lighted up. “Looks kinder like you was goin’ to
have some,” he said.
Mark didn’t answer anything or ask questions, because if you do
Uncle Ike is apt to shut up like a clam and not tell you another
thing. He waited, knowing Ike’d tell on if there was anything to
say. The old man puffed away for a spell and then asked:
“Father’s makin’ some sort of a whirligig, ain’t he?”
“Yes. He’s inventin’ a e-e-engine.”
“Um!” grunted Uncle Ike. “Calc’late it’s wuth anythin’?”
Mark nodded yes.
“Feller come in on the mornin’ train that seemed tolerable
int’rested in sich whirligigs,” said Uncle Ike. “He allowed to set
onto the seat with me and asked was I acquainted in town—me! Asked
was I acquainted in town!” It was hard for me to tell whether this
made Uncle Ike mad or tickled him. He was that way, and you never
could make him out. Sometimes when he was maddest he looked most
tickled, and when he was most tickled he looked maddest.
“I allowed as how I knowed a few of the citizens by sight and more’n
a dozen to speak to,” Uncle Ike went on, “and then he up and begun
wantin’ to know. When folks gits to the wantin’-to-know stage on
short acquaintance I git to the don’t-want-to-tell stage, and Mister
Man didn’t collect no amazin’ store of knowledge, not while he was
a-ridin’ on _my_ bus.”
He stopped talking and looked at Mark, and Mark looked at him. Then
Uncle Ike winked at Mark. “If I was a smart boy,” he said, “and a
stranger feller come to town snoopin’ around and askin’ questions
about whirligigs, I’d sorter look into it, I would. And if that
stranger feller was askin’ about the i-dentical kind of a whirligig
my father was makin’ in the barn and calc’latin’ to git rich out of
I’d look into it perty close. And if my father was one of these here
inventor fellers that forgits their own names and would trust a cow
to walk through a cornfield I’d be perty sharp and plannin’ and keep
my eye peeled. That’s what I’d do, and I ain’t drove a bus these
twenty years for nothin’, neither. The place to git eddicated,” he
said, “is on top of a bus. There ain’t nothin’ like it. There’s
where you see folks goin’ away and comin’ home, and there’s where
you see strangers and actors and travelin’-men, and everybody that
walks the face of the earth. Colleges is all right, maybe, for
readin’ and writin’, but when it comes to knowin’ who you kin depend
on and who you got to look out for the bus is the place.”
“Did he ask about f-f-father?” Mark wanted to know.
“He didn’t mention him by name,” said Uncle Ike, grinning. “But he
says to me, says he, ‘This is a nice town,’ says he, ‘and a town
that looks as if there was smart folks in it. It’s lettle towns like
this,’ he says, ‘that inventors and other great men comes from,’
says he. ‘Have you got any inventors here?’ he asks.
“‘There’s Pete Biggs,’ I says. ‘He’s up and invented a way to live
without workin’.’
“‘Is that all?’ he asks, kind of disappointed.
“‘Wa-al,’ I says, like I was tryin’ hard to remember, ‘I _did_ hear
that Slim Peters invented some kind of a new front gate that would
keep itself shut. But ’twan’t no go,’ I says, ‘’cause Slim he had to
chop down the gate with a ax,’ I says, ‘the first time he wanted to
go through it. It was a fine gate to stay shut,’ I says, ‘but it
wa’n’t no good at all to come open.’
“‘Ain’t there anybody here tryin’ to make an engine?’ he put in.
“‘Engine?’ says I. ‘Engines is already invented, ain’t they? What’s
the use inventin’ when some other feller’s done it first?’
“‘I mean a new kind of an engine,’ he says, ‘a kind they call a
turbine?’
“‘Oh,’ says I. ‘I ain’t met up with no engines like that, not in
Wicksville. We ain’t much on fancy names here, and I guess if a
Wicksville feller had invented anythin’ he wouldn’t have named it
that—he’d ’a’ called it a engine right out.’
“‘Umph!’ says the feller, like he was mad, and then got out at the
hotel. I stopped long enough to see him talkin’ with Bert Sawyer, so
it’s likely he knowed all Bert did inside of ten minutes. And that’s
all there was to it.” He looked at Mark with his eyes twinkling.
Mark got up kind of slow, blinking his eyes and looking back at
Uncle Ike.
“I guess I’ll go home,” he said.
Uncle Ike slapped his knee and laughed a rattling kind of laugh way
down in his throat. “There,” he whispered, like he was talking
confidential to Binney and Plunk and me, “what’d I tell you? Hey?
What’d I tell you? Don’t take him long to make up his mind, eh?
Quicker’n a flash; slicker’n greased lightnin’!”
We went off up the hill after Mark, leaving Uncle Ike sitting on the
log laughing to himself and slapping his leg every minute or so. He
sat there till we were out of sight.