“Well, maybe I do, Mr. Smarty,” replied the girl. “One thing I am quite sure of—you don’t!”
“Come, children; neither of you rule the ranch,” Aunt Betty intervened. “I rule it and expect to do so for an indefinite period.”
“See!” Jim cried, tauntingly. “Told you so! Told you so!”
Dorothy aimed a playful blow at him, but he dodged and caught her arm in a vise-like grip, refusing to let go until she had promised to be a good girl.
At ten-fifteen they passed through a village which Gerald said was the half-way mark between Baltimore and the South Mountains.
“We have rather a bad stretch of road ahead, however,” he told them, “so for the next half hour it will be slower going. But wait till we strike the graveled county road this side of Baltimore. Then we’ll make up some of our lost time.”
But somehow this did not interest Aunt Betty. She was talking with the girls and apparently felt not the slightest tremor at the thought of going at a faster pace—a change that Dorothy noticed and commented on with no little delight.
Just when Gerald was congratulating himself that the roughest part of the trip was over, the front tire on the left exploded with a bang that brought a scream from every feminine inmate of the car.