“Well, we certainly didn’t,” that honest pair insisted. “We didn’t even finish the race. We didn’t go near the pine tree.”
Mistah Mule laughed boisterously.
“Mistah Bear, he done win,” said Mistah Mule. “I looks back just once. An’ there he am, right under the big pine his own self.”
XXVIII
UNEXPECTED HELP
Farmer Green had just had the bad luck to have a loaded wagon sink hub-deep in a boggy place in the meadow, near the barnyard. The pair of bays were harnessed to the wagon. And they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—pull it out of the mire.
Farmer Green walked to the horse-barn, where his son Johnnie and the hired man were working.
“The load is stuck fast in the mud,” he told them. “If Bright and Broad weren’t ’way up in the back pasture they’d pull the wagon out. But it would take a good hour to drive them down here.”
The oxen, Bright and Broad, were a famous pair. They were wonderfully strong—and wonderfully slow, too.
“There’s old Ebenezer. You might hitch him in front of the bays,” the hired man suggested.
Farmer Green shook his head.