Then she
told me o' how one o' the teachers--a young fellow from a college--was
goin' to set up a school o' his own and goin' to git some o' the
graduates to help teach when he got started, and how he had asked her to
be one o' 'em, and how she was goin' with him.
"Since you been here and us three been together and I begun to see how
happy she was a-talkin' to you and askin' you questions, I got worse'n
ever over her. I begun to see that I warn't what I had been to her. When
we was trampin' and fishin' it was all right and she'd talk to me 'bout
the ways o' the birds and what flowers come up fust and all that, but
when it got to geography and history I warn't in it with her, and you
was. That sickened me more'n ever. Pretty soon I began to feel as if
everything I had in life war slippin' away from me. I didn't want her to
shut me out from anything she had. I wanted to have half, same's we
allus had--half for me and half for her. Why, lately, when I lay awake
nights a-thinkin' it over, I've wished sometimes that she hadn't growed
up at all, and that she'd allus be my baby-girl and I her Uncle Jim.
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