“We’ll carry you,” announced Mary Ellen, with a decided air. “Sammy and I will make a chair of our hands and carry you.”
But Sammy had a bright idea. He pointed to the open stable door, and, out of it, as if to solve their problem for them, walked Maggie Medicine, harnessed to her cart.
“Quick,” said Sammy, “before any one stops us.”
“Oh, Sammy, do you think we ought?” asked Mary Ellen in a little voice, a question that was not meant to be answered, for she had already boosted Lydia into the cart and was scrambling in herself.
“’Fraid-cats may stay at home. We’re a-going,” was Sammy’s reply, as he started Maggie down the drive with a shake of the reins and a flourish of the whip.
And while Maggie Medicine jogs peacefully along the country road, shaking her head and twitching her ears now and then as a sign to Sammy to stop jerking the reins, let us see where all the grown people were this sunny afternoon.
In the first place, Mary Ellen and Sammy had been asked to spend the afternoon to keep Lydia company, because Father and Mother and Friend Morris were invited out to spend the day. Friend Deborah, who had gone about her work all morning with her head tied up in a handkerchief, had at last been forced to go to bed “to favor the faceache,” as she said. Alexander, to keep the house quiet and give the children a good time, had planned a drive, but no sooner had he fastened the last strap in Maggie’s harness than word came that the black colt had jumped the pasture bars and was running away.
So poor patient Alexander was racing up the hot, dusty road in one direction, while innocent Maggie, with her load, ambled along in the other. When they came to the little bridge, Maggie saw a cool, shady back road stretching before her in pleasant contrast to the dusty highway, and being a wise little pony, she promptly turned in and trotted briskly past the mill as she had done the week before with Friend Deborah. Sammy thought it was due to his skillful driving, but Maggie twitched her ear as if to say, “Don’t imagine that I pay any attention to you children, please.”
On they went, until Lydia pointed to a little house, half hidden under vines, with two or three bedraggled hens scratching about in the front yard.
“That’s it,” said Lydia. “I remember it. That’s it.”