_prove_ how I know it--will you go to Mr. Lothrop's and stay four days?” “Four days!” she says; “I'll stay a year!” “All right,” I says, “I don't want nothing more out of _you_ than just your word--I druther have it than another man's kiss-the-Bible.”  She smiled and reddened up very sweet, and I says, “If you don't mind it, I'll shut the door--and bolt it.” Then I come back and set down again, and says: “Don't you holler.  Just set still and take it like a man.  I got to tell the truth, and you want to brace up, Miss Mary, because it's a bad kind, and going to be hard to take, but there ain't no help for it.  These uncles of yourn ain't no uncles at all; they're a couple of frauds--regular dead-beats.  There, now we're over the worst of it, you can stand the rest middling easy.” It jolted her up like everything, of course; but I was over the shoal water now, so I went right along, her eyes a-blazing higher and higher all the time, and told her every blame thing, from where we first struck that young fool going up to the steamboat, clear through to where she flung herself on to the king's breast at the front door and he kissed her sixteen or seventeen times--and then up she jumps, with her face afire like sunset, and says: “The brute!  Come, don't waste a minute--not a _second_--we'll have them tarred and feathered, and flung in the river!” Says I: “Cert'nly.  But do you mean _before_ you go to Mr. Lothrop's, or--” “Oh,” she says, “what am I _thinking_ about!” she says, and set right down again. “Don't mind what I said--please don't--you _won't,_ now, _will_ you?” Laying her silky hand on mine in that kind of a way that I said I would die first. “I never thought, I was so stirred up,” she says; “now go on, and I won't do so any more.  You tell me what to do, and whatever you say I'll do it.” “Well,” I says, “it's a rough gang, them two frauds, and I'm fixed so I got to travel with them a while longer, whether I want to or not--I druther not tell you why