six o'clock
Every mountaineer has heard that word , and another -- the Legislator . Chad shivered as he looked , for he could recall that sometimes down in the mountains a man would disappear for years and turn up again at home , whitened by confinement ; and , during his absence , when anyone asked about him , the answer was penitentiary . He wondered what those boxes on the walls were for , and he was about to ask , when a guard stepped from one of them with a musket and started to patrol the wall , and he had no need to ask . Tom wanted to go up on the hill and look at the Armory and the graveyard , but the school-master said they did not have time , and , on the moment , the air was startled with whistles far and near -- six o'clock ! At once Caleb Hazel led the way to supper in the boarding-house , where a kind-faced old lady spoke to Chad in a motherly way , and where the boy saw his first hot biscuit and was almost afraid to eat anything at the table for fear he might do something wrong . For the first time in his life , too , he slept on a mattress without any feather-bed , and Chad lay wondering , but unsatisfied still . Not yet had he been out of sight of the hills , but the master had told him that they would see the Bluegrass next day , when they were to start back to the mountains by train as far as Lexington .