“Where does the sound come from?” demanded Agnes in her abrupt way, but very carefully picking brown chestnuts out of a prickly burr—and with gloves on one may be sure. Catch Agnes Kenway, the “beauty sister,” ever doing anything to spoil her hands!
“Say! Is this a game? Like ‘cum-je-cum’?” grumbled Sammy Pinkney, who did not wear gloves and therefore had already got plenty of “prickers” in his stubbed fingers, although the nutting party had not been in the grove half an hour. “I’ll bite. How big is the noise?”
“Well,” said Dot seriously, and answering Sammy’s query first, “it is not a big noise at all. I just manage to hear it. And it’s gone now.”
“It can’t be a wolf, or anything like that,” said the eminently practical Tess, whose proper name, Theresa, was seldom heard save from the lips of her Aunt Sarah Maltby.
“O-oo!” squealed Dot, squeezing her Alice-doll harder. “Don’t, Tess! A wolf!”
“There’d be some fun in that,” declared Sammy, inspired instantly to romantic imagination. “We’d have to hitch up the horses again, and take to the sledge, and flee——”
“There are no horses, and it’s our automobile,” interrupted Tess, with disdain.
“Aw—you!” gruffly exclaimed Sammy. “Can’t you play this is the Russian steppes?”
“What’s Russian steps, Sammy? Aren’t they like American steps?” asked Dot, who had a bump of inquisitiveness second to none. “I know what Russian sables are, and a Russian samovar, for Ruth has one, an awful ugly thing. And Russian car—caviar. Little black seeds that come in a can and you eat ’em—if you are Russian. But I’m not Russian and I don’t like ’em.”
“That steppes means plains, I guess. Anyway, they are like the western prairies, and there are wolves on ’em. And when they chase you they are faster than the horses can run.”