The Clock by James Lincoln Collier

said he was going to. I figured maybe he could get your pa to take it serious.”
    â€œIt didn’t help. Pa still doesn’t believe it. He told your pa it was all just stories.”
    â€œBut it isn’t stories,” Hetty said. “The girls all know about it.”
    â€œHetty, you didn’t tell your pa about Mr. Hoggart stealing wool, did you?”
    â€œOh, no,” she said. “You made me promise. Besides, I don’t know as Pa would believe it unless you had proof.”
    But now I had proof. I wondered: Ought I to tell Mr. Brown myself? “Hetty, does your pa know Colonel Humphreys?”
    â€œI think he knows him some,” Hetty said. “He made a farm wagon for him once, and he mends his wagon wheels for him sometimes. I reckon he knows him.”
    But I decided I’d better talk it over with Robert before I said anything more. So I changed the subject, and we talked about the new bonnet Hetty was making herself until we got to her house and I headed for home.
    For the next few days I hardly got a chance to see Robert. Mr. Hoggart had got him limping here and limping there all day long, carrying things. It was taking all the strength out of him, and the few times I saw him he looked so tired I didn’t want to bring up anything that would cause him worry. But finally I did. “Robert, Mr. Brown knows Colonel Humphreys. Leastwise, he did some work for him.”
    Robert thought about it. “Annie, I reckon we ought to go slow. We still aren’t exactly sure that there’s wool in that cabin. Suppose we got Mr. Brown to go out there and break into the place, and there wasn’t any wool? That’d be the end of you and me. Mr. Hoggart would let me go first thing. I’d have to leave town for sure then.”
    â€œBut you can’t go on like this, Robert. It’ll kill you.
    â€œOh, I’ll manage for a while. Meanwhile we’ll keep our eyes open and see if we can get better proof.”
    â€œWell, then we have to go back out to the cabin some night and find out.”
    â€œWe could try it. But we’d have to find a way to open the lock.”
    â€œI’ll think of something.”
    It snowed some that night, and off and on the next day, and then the sky cleared and the temperature began to drop. We were in for a real cold spell, with everything frozen up tight. Pa and George took the ox sledge over to the woodlot, where last year’s cutting was piled, ready to be sawed and split. They were gone all day, and when they came back the sweat was freezing to their faces. But they had enough firewood to hold us through a cold spell, if it didn’t go on for more than a week or so.
    Pa was still campaigning about the clock; he wouldn’t let up on it. We had our meals to it, said our prayers to it, and went to bed to it. Ma fought it off as best she could. Meals didn’t come just so, but ten or fifteen minutes late, and when Pa told her it was time for bed she’d generally find something that had to be done, leaving Pa to grumble—why couldn’t it wait until morning, or why hadn’t she thought of it before. But she couldn’t stretch it too far: She knew Pa had the right and duty to set the rules around the house. He wouldn’t let off talking about it. We had to hear about it all the time. “It’s a marvel,” Pa said. “Once only the rich could afford clocks, but with the new methods of manufacturing, these mechanisms will soon be found in every home, no matter how humble. That’s the great value of these new methods. Where it used to take a clockmaker a week to make one of these, six men in a factory using this system can turn out several a day.”
    â€œBound to put a lot of clockmakers out of work, I should reckon,” Ma said.
    â€œNot a bit of it,” Pa said. “That’s the beauty of the new system. It brings the price down so that every farmer in the country