"See if you're as good at untying knots as you are at tying them," added Jerry, as he twisted Chet's necktie into a veritable Chinese puzzle.
"And now see how it feels to walk around in your bare feet," suggested Phil, as he hung one of Chet's socks over the limb of a tree some distance down the road and placed the other in the middle of a clump of brambles.
Biff Hooper and Tony then released the protesting Chet. They had been sitting on him in the middle of the lane while the others were performing their kindly offices. "We'll see you down at the farm," said Biff airily, as the lads went chuckling down the lane in the direction of Stummer's place.
Spluttering and vowing threats, Chet was forced to retrieve his clothes. When he sought to regain his boot from the pasture the bull saw him and rushed toward him with a bellow. Chet, in bare feet, just reached the fence in time and tumbled over into the bushes with the rescued boot. Then he had to step gingerly through the thistle patch in the other field before he could get the other boot. After that he had to climb a tree before he could reach one sock, and go plunging through the brambles before he could regain the other. When the laughing boys last saw him he was sitting by the roadside picking thistles from his feet and gazing hopelessly at his necktie.
"He's cured for a while now," chuckled Joe, as the boys came up into the barnyard of Stummer's farm.
"Cure him? Never!" exclaimed Frank. "He'll be making us all step before the day is out."
CHAPTER VI
The Old Mill
Carl Stummer, a lanky, shambling old farmer with drooping shoulders, a drooping mustache and a drooping pipe, was just coming in from the fields when the boys came through the barnyard gate.
How he managed to chew a straw and smoke a pipe perpetually at the same time was always a fascinating mystery, but he could do it and always seemed to derive a great deal of satisfaction from the feat, stopping only to change the straw or fill the pipe at intervals. Some people had been known to have seen him without the straw and some had seen him without the pipe, but no one had ever seen him without one or the other.