busts out and
jest natcherally bellers. "I hate you!" she says, like she could of
killed me.

That made me kind of dumb agin. Fur it come to me all to oncet I liked
that girl awful well. And here I'd up and made her hate me. I held the
book out to her agin and says:

"Well, I'm mighty sorry fur that, fur I don't feel that-a-way about you
a-tall. Here's your book."

Well, sir, she snatches that book and she gives it a sling. I thought it
was going kersplash into the crick. But it didn't. It hit right into the
fork of a limb that hung down over the crick, and it all spread out when
it lit, and stuck in that crotch somehow. She couldn't of slung it that
way on purpose in a million years. We both stands and looks at it a
minute.

"Oh, oh!" she says, "what have I done? It's out of the town library and
I'll have to pay for it."

"I'll get it fur you," I says. But it wasn't no easy job. If I shook
that limb it would tumble into the crick. But I clumb the tree and eased
out on that limb as fur as I dast to. And, of course, jest as I got holt
of the book, that limb broke and I fell into the crick. But I had the
book. It was some soaked, but I reckoned it could still be read.

I clumb out and she was jest splitting herself laughing at me. The
wet on her face where she had cried wasn't dried up yet, and she was
laughing right through it, kind o' like the sun does to one of these
here May rainstorms sometimes, and she was the purtiest girl I ever
seen. Gosh!--how I was getting to like that girl! And she told me I
looked like a drowned rat.

Well, that was how Martha and me was interduced. She wasn't more'n
sixteen, and when she found out I was a orphan she was glad, fur she was
one herself. Which Miss Hampton that lived in that house had took her to
raise. And when I tells her how I been travelling around the country all
summer she claps her hands and she says:

"Oh, you are on a quest! How romantic!"

I asts her what is a quest. And she tells me. She knowed all about them,
fur Martha was considerable of a reader. Some of them was longer and
some of them was shorter, them quests, but mostly, Martha says, they was
fur a twelvemonth and a day. And then you are released from your vow
and one of these here queens gives you a whack over the shoulder with a
sword and says: "Arise, Sir Marmeluke, I dub you a night." And then it
is legal fur you to go out and rescue people and reform them and spear
them if they don't see thing