"How can I help that?" Twinkleheels asked them.
"You could decline with thanks," they explained.
Twinkleheels shook his head.
"It wouldn't be polite," he said. "Besides, I like potatoes and apples and carrots even more than oats and hay."
Just then Farmer Green came into the barn and backed the bays out of their stalls. They both sighed.
"We're in for it now," they told Ebenezer. "He's going to take us out and make us walk on the tread mill."
A little later Johnnie Green saddled Twinkleheels and followed his father and the bays to the field where the thrashing machine stood beside several stacks of oats.
Before Johnnie and Twinkleheels arrived on the scene a great clatter warned them that thrashing had already begun. Hurrying up, they found the bays toiling up the endless path that slid always downward beneath them.
The bays were a glum appearing pair. Twinkleheels tried to speak to them, but the thrashing machine made such a racket that they couldn't hear him whinny; and he couldn't catch their eyes. They wouldn't look at him.
A stream of oats was pouring out of the grain spout. Johnnie Green dismounted. Picking up a handful of the newly thrashed oats, he fed Twinkleheels.