“Let us take Maude and Jerry,” begged Ann. “We’ll get them into the shed.”
“All right,” Mr. Bailey consented. “Only get a move on you. After this long dry spell the storm will be some blow, and don’t you forgit it.”
Ben chose to bring in Maude, for he loved the slow-moving gentle creature with her soft brown eyes that always seemed so interested in him every time he appeared.
Ann’s job was Jerry. He was as eager as she to get within the four walls of his shelter. He went briskly down the cart path and into the barnyard and stopped on the spot where the cart belonged, all without the need of much guiding from Ann. It was there that Ann’s trouble began. She didn’t know how to unharness him. She could not discover which of the big buckles distributed about the harness would free him. Even after she had unfastened the traces, as she had seen Jo do, Jerry still stayed firmly fixed between the shafts. He turned his head and looked at her with patient wonder as if he wanted to know why he was being kept there.
Ben, coming in with Maude walking sedately before him, proved to be of little help. “Jerry sticks there because he is so fat,” he suggested. “See, the shafts bulge out over his sides. We’ll have to pull him out.”
But though Ben held the shafts while Ann pulled at Jerry’s head they had no better success. Whenever Jerry moved forward an inch the cart came, too.
Ann knew how Mr. Bailey would laugh if he and Jo reached the barnyard and found that she had been beaten by a buckle. Besides, she had promised to get Jerry under cover, and into his stall he should go if it were a possible thing; she was determined to get him there. She would unbuckle every strap in his harness until she came to the ones that held him to the cart. So she and Ben began with those nearest, and some of them were so stiff that they couldn’t have been unfastened since the harness was bought, goodness knew how many years ago.
At last Jerry was free. He seemed to know when the right buckle came undone. He stepped forward and looked at Ann and Ben with an expression of mild disgust, then he braced himself and had one fine shake, the harness showering down in dozens of little straps. Again he looked at the children, as if to say, “Now see what you have done!”
Without waiting he stalked away to his stall.
Ann and Ben began to pick up the miscellaneous bits of harness as fast as they could, but Jo came and caught them before they had quite finished. He laughed until he was weak as he watched them on their hands and knees picking up the little pieces. Even Jerry turned around in his corner and stared with astonished eyes.