“Your father has gone to the village,” Mrs. Green told him. “Maybe you’d rather stay at home, anyhow.”
“Oh, no!” Johnnie exclaimed quickly. And snatching up his umbrella, he slipped out of the door.
“I’m not going to walk ’way over the hill—not if I have to carry this umbrella,” he muttered as soon as he was out of his mother’s hearing.
A few minutes later he was throwing his saddle on Mistah Mule. And then he mounted him.
Mistah Mule cocked his eye at the closed umbrella in Johnnie Green’s hand.
“What for this boy got that club?” he asked himself. “He better not hit me with it.”
Once in the road, Johnnie urged Mistah Mule into a canter. He noticed that dark clouds were fast gathering overhead. And white wisps of cloud were beginning to whisk over the top of Blue Mountain.
“Giddap! Giddap!” he cried to Mistah Mule. “We want to get to Red’s house before the storm breaks.”
They weren’t half way up the long hill when the wind began to whip the tree-tops and a driving rain swept across the valley, pelting them with great drops.
Johnnie Green fumbled with the strap of his umbrella. And then he raised it, spread, over his head.