Keep your mouth shut till it's time to
open it. I'm drawing this thing here strong on you, so as to impress it.
As for the other fellows--if I had got off the train at Burnside to-day
the news would have been in every afternoon paper in the State. They'd
only need that one fact to build fifty stories on--all different. _Most_
of those stories would have hurt; there'd have been one guess, at least,
that would kill the scheme. Sit down here, and let's take it easy."
He sat at the foot of a tree, his broad straw hat beside him. He leaned
his head against the trunk, and gazed upward and away from his grandson.
When the question came it was so irrelevant, so astonishing, that the
young man gasped without replying.
"Harlan, how do you stand with the Kavanagh girl?"
The old man smoked on in the silence without removing his gaze from the
leaves above his head.
"I want to confess to you, my boy, that your old grandfather made rather
a disgraceful exhibition of himself the other day. But as I said then, a
man will thrash and swear at a hornet and make an ass of himself,
generally, in the operation.
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