“Oh, that would be of no use,” spoke Mary, quickly. “We don’t know where we live, and it would take too much time riding around trying to find our house.”
“But what will you do?” asked the poor man, who was the head of the hungry family, as the auto puffed off.
“Oh, some one will be sure to come for us,” said Mary.
“That’s right,” agreed Tommy and Johnny, and they looked around the room, where the hungry family lived. It wasn’t a very nice room, but it was clean. And as for the hungry family, they weren’t hungry any more, because they had eaten nearly all the things in the basket. It was like when the Trippertrots took the Thanksgiving dinner to the poor family, you know.
And, all of a sudden, ten cute, little, tiny mice peeked out from a hole in the floor, and they made their whiskers go backward and forward, and they sniffed with their sharp little noses, and their bright eyes looked all around.
“Oh, aren’t they too dear for anything!” exclaimed Mary. “I wonder what they want?”
“I guess they want to be fed, too,” spoke the poor boy. “They live in this house, and they’re hungry, too. Nearly everybody around here is hungry, I guess, the same as we were.”
“Well, we’ll give them some crumbs,” suggested Johnny, and the children did this, and I just wish you could have seen the mice eat them up. It was Christmas for them, too.
So Mary and Tommy and Johnny Trippertrot stayed all that afternoon at the house of the hungry family, and they played games, and had a good time. But still no one came for the runaways.
“I wonder if no one is ever coming?” said Mary. “We can’t stay here forever.”