noon
He cooked a breakfast , but how he cooked it or of what it consisted he could not have told . The next day he found the stove-lid lifter on a plate in the ice chest . Whatever became of the left-over pork chop which should have been there he had no idea . Babbie came dancing in at noon on her way home from school . She found her Uncle Jed in a curious mood , a mood which seemed to be a compound of absent-mindedness and silence broken by sudden fits of song and hilarity . He was sitting by the bench when she entered and was holding an oily rag in one hand and a piece of emery paper in the other . He was looking neither at paper nor rag , nor at anything else in particular so far as she could see , and he did not notice her presence at all .