“Oh, nowhere in particular. Just up to where the highway touches the Lane.”
“Sure, I’ll go. I can’t see what you’re driving at, but I’ll go along.”
They stepped into the dock, walked the long stretch that made up their back yard, passed the house and walked out to the shady street on which their home stood, a street appropriately called the Lane. They walked slowly down it, making plans concerning provisioning the sloop for the cruise, which they expected to begin on the following day. About half a mile from the house the Lane ran into the State highway, and here Jim said he wanted to sit on a stone wall. So they sat down and continued to talk for a time.
Don finally became restless. “Let’s go to town and get some of the things we need,” he suggested. “No use sitting here all day.”
But Jim was not ready to go yet. He was looking down the road, to where a single car was coming toward them. It was a battered old rattletrap of a car, with sad-looking mudguards, no top, and doubtful looking tires on it. The wheels, which were the least bit crooked, made weird movements as it came toward them.
“Wait a minute,” Jim said. “I want to see who’s in this car.”
The driver of the car was a red-headed boy of seventeen, tanned by the sun and endowed with a multitude of freckles. Two laughing gray eyes peered from his long face. He looked Scotch. He was whistling as he drove the battered old car, and his sandy hair, decidedly red in the sun, stood up almost straight. There was no glass in the windshield of his car, and now and then he pretended to wipe the missing glass, greatly to the amusement of as many of the Bridgewater inhabitants as chanced to be on the road.
“Why do you want to see who the driver is?” Don began, impatiently. “You don’t——”
He broke off as Jim waved to the driver, and the driver waved back and brought his bounding car to a halt beside them. Don gasped.
“Why ‘Chucklehead’ Mackson!” he cried, while Jim grinned.