        Then he did something unexpected.  He pushed the eleventh marble over, speaking a word.  He wrote two vertical lines in his notebook—which looked like two weak els or a strong I, with a word next to it.  He pushed the final marble over, saying another word, and writing another two symbols in his notebook.  When he began writing his second word, she suddenly realized that these were numbers.  Apparently, these creatures were either so sloppy in their penmanship that they didn’t care that some strong and weak letters could be confused with each other or with numbers, or else they weren’t clever enough to have come up with more distinct symbols.  What was obvious was Dale’s kind added their second digit at ten.