“This certainly is fine news, wife, and you better go along with me so you can pick out your new dress and bonnet while we are in town, for their headquarters, where I am to deliver the dog and cat, are in a large town where there are plenty of big stores. We will start early to-morrow morning, about daylight, as it is a long ways and we want to reach these headquarters before noon so as to get our money and have the whole afternoon to shop.”
Stubby heard all this as he lay on his end of the sofa pretending to be asleep. The minute the farmer and his wife left the room, he to get the automobile in shape for the trip in the morning, and his wife to lay out her best clothes, Stubby barked for Button and Duke to come in to share the news he had just heard.
They both listened without interrupting until Stubby had finished, then Button said:
“It is a good thing your leg has healed so you can walk on it and that you are feeling so strong and well, for if they mean to take us to headquarters to-morrow morning, we must manage to escape some time to-night.”
“You are right,” replied Duke. “But why wait until night? It would be easier to escape some time this afternoon before we are shut in for the night. The farmer never seems to think we will try to run away until dark as he leaves us pretty much alone all day but at the first hint of darkness he shuts us in.”
“That is all true. So let us wait and get a good dinner and then when he lies down to take his twenty winks of sleep, as he does every afternoon, we will skedaddle. His wife will be so busy getting her finery ready to wear to-morrow that she won’t have time even to look out of the window.”
And so it was planned for them to push on to where Billy waited for them.
It is a good thing that they decided to go when they did for Billy was getting terribly restless waiting for them, and was likely to get in mischief if they did not arrive soon.
The three simply stuffed themselves at dinner time. And as they were finishing, Button said, “Isn’t it too bad we haven’t pockets in our skins so we could take some of this fine food along with us to eat when we can’t find anything along the roadside?”
“It surely is,” said Stubby, “and I don’t see why we could not have had our tails so constructed that we could have hung packages on them like the opossums carry their young, hanging over their mother’s tail with all their little tails curled around hers to hold them on.”