But neither performance served to dislodge Bedelia. She stuck like a burr and all Dick’s frantic experiments in the matter of jumping and bucking proved futile.
Round and round they spun, Dick’s hind hoofs describing the circumference of a circle; until finally, with an indignant snort and fully determined to rid himself of his terrifying incumbrance, he flung himself full length on the turf and commenced to roll over and over. Now indeed did Bedelia prove the depth of her generalship. She had precious little time to consider how she should escape being flattened out like a pancake, but she mastered the situation by a sudden stroke of genius the like of which sometimes accompanies a desperate situation.
Suddenly she sprang into the air and continued to spring at intervals, Dick’s revolving body giving her for a second a precarious foothold as she descended, something after the fashion of a performing circus pony who turns a barrel with his hoofs. And so she kept on hopping up and down for her life while Dick continued to roll, horns and hoofs alternately twinkling in the air. And how long the ridiculous comedy would have gone on goodness only knows, had not Mike, the hired hand, just then appeared on the scene.
CHAPTER VII.
“A Valley So Sweet.”
Mrs. North had decided to drive to a place a few miles distant called the Falls, there to take supper and remain all night.
And Mike was on his way to the stables to hitch up, as he called it, when the amazing spectacle just described burst upon his astonished sight. At once he jumped to the conclusion that the goat was trying to make mince-meat of Sally’s beloved Teddy bear. And springing forward—he seized Dick by his horns, yanked him to his feet and drove him off to the stables. Then returning he picked up Bedelia, no longer pirouetting like a ballet girl, but suddenly grown mute and stiff, and carried her to the kitchen, where Mrs. Hale took her in charge.
The children were now in a flutter of excitement over the proposed trip to the Falls. Sally insisted on taking Peter Pan, and presently they were all comfortably stowed away in a springy country carriage, rolling along toward the Falls.