“Steady—boy! Steady, there! Easy—now! Who the deuce can parlez-vous a horse? That’s me! Oh-h! five little pigs went to market.”
Was there ever the Paddy, yet, who could resist such treatment?
Two minutes later a farmer, coming in mad haste and trembling to the barn door, beheld, in the dim dawn a girl queening it in dun trappings of hay upon a perfectly docile farmhorse—which rolled the whites of its eyes at him sheepishly—the great jaws grinding upon a sheaf of hay.
“Good—old—Paddy!” Patronizingly she patted the shoulder that would have rubbed her out, rose to a standing position upon the broad back, her up-flung hand gripping the top of the stall.
Coolly she drew herself up, crept along the dark stall-edge, dropped from the partition into the manger and thence, with a light spring, to the barn floor.
“Where are you—Dorothy? Oh-h! where are—you?” she anxiously cried.
came a laughing voice.
“Wal! I swan to goodness there ain’t much ‘woolgathering’ about either o’ you.” The farmer slapped his leg, with a roar. “Oh! I started at midnight fer to tell you about that hayloft floor, jest bone-shanks, bare poles across, widish spaces between ’em—and the hay thinned out in places. But, land! what’s the odds?” He beamed upon Paddy’s rider. “I vum even the Little Lone Lady will never get the better of you.”
“She’ll never ride off in my shoes, eh?” laughed Pemrose. “But she was right about the commotion among all the animals before morning; wasn’t she?” as she flew to extricate Dorothy.