Thus by making it a matter of athletic prowess the boys carried their loads to the destination. But the little heaps on the dusty earth looked pitifully insignificant. Skinny borrowed a pin and lanced the white protuberance at the base of his second finger.
"Jiminy," he mourned, as he squeezed the water out. "It's going to be an awful lot of work, fellows."
They raked the sand level along the path from the plate to first base. Not by the wildest stretch of imagination could they seem to reach even a quarter of the distance, and protruding grass blades showed that the covering was far too scanty.
"Where's your wagon, John?" asked Red Brown suddenly.
"Busted," said John, reproachfully. "Have you forgotten?"
During the summer preceding, a fever of wagon building had seized the boys. Every spare wheel and tricycle frame in the block had been requisitioned for the construction of a half-dozen little vehicles which suddenly appeared to scud down the sidewalks and over the smooth macadam street. There had been discussions and disputes as to speed, and John's wagon, a long, well-oiled affair with a coat of red, discarded house paint on its framework, had come to grief in a collision with Brown's, one sunny afternoon. Even Silvey, the optimist, who had furnished the motive power, had looked at the wreckage in well-founded despair.
"Where's yours?" Red turned abruptly to the Harrison boys.
"In the basement."
Skinny Mosher's, too, was still in existence. All the rest of the morning and afternoon, the two wagons ran merrily toward the Southern Avenue sand hill, or creaked slowly and laboriously back to the "Tigers' Home Grounds," with such good effect that but a scant ten feet of path remained to be filled in when John's paper route called him.
Silvey and he sauntered over that evening after supper to make the final inspection of the work.