“Well, ’cause it will give us a start. You see if some other boys and girls see him riding they’ll want to ride too, and it will be a sort of advertisement for us.”
“Maybe it would. Come on, Jimmie. You get in and I’ll walk along ’side the wagon and drive Nicknack. Janet will be conductor and make-believe she’s collected your fare. Then it will look as if we had made a start.”
“Do I have to hold Trouble?” asked Jimmie.
“Course,” decided Ted. “He can’t walk. But you don’t have to hear him sing if you don’t want to, or he can sit beside you if you don’t want to hold him. Only don’t let him fall.”
“I’s goin’ to sing,” declared Baby William, and he began on the tenth or maybe the fifteenth verse. Sometimes he put the first and last verses together and made an entirely new one, so one never could tell when the song ended except when Trouble stopped singing.
“Oh, well, you can sing, and you can sit on the seat next to me,” said Jimmie. “I’m much obliged for the ride.”
“You’re an advertisement like a newspaper,” explained Janet.
“And I think he ought to sort of holler out like, and say what a fine ride he was havin’ so’s more would come,” went on Ted. “We’ve got to make money somehow.”
“I’ll holler,” promised Jimmie.
So, as he rode in the goat wagon, with Trouble on the seat beside him, while Teddy drove and Janet tried to look as if she had collected her first fare, Jimmie called out: