"Let me help!" begged Russ. "I can throw stones!"
"No! No!" exclaimed his father. "You look after Rose and the children. Better climb back into the auto. He can't get at you there."
Russ started to do as his father had requested, and then the three men rushed at the ram together. The mule driver cracked his whip, making sounds like Fourth of July fire-crackers. Captain Ben and Daddy Bunker shouted and waved their fence rails. The ram stood for a moment, poised on top of a little mound of grass, where he had climbed after butting Captain Ben.
"Baa-a-a-a!" bleated the big sheep, as though saying he was not afraid of all of them.
But before Captain Ben or Daddy Bunker could reach at him with the rails, and before the mule driver could flick him with the cracking whip, the ram thought better of his idea. He uttered another loud "Baa-a-a!" and then, turning, ran back into the field whence he had come.
"Oh, I'm so glad he's gone!" cried Rose, who, with the other little Bunkers, had been about to climb into the tilted automobile.
"He may come back again," said the mule driver. "He's a bad one, all right, that ram is. I've been traveling this canal towpath for five years, and I know old Hector. Whenever he gets loose there's trouble."
"I guess we were too much for him this time," said Daddy Bunker. "I fancy he did not like the cracking of your whip."
"That's about the only way I can scare him," said the mule driver. "I'll keep it handy in case he comes back."
But Hector, the ram, did not seem to have any idea of coming back. He ambled off over the green meadow, now and then looking back and uttering a "Baa-a-a!" It was as though he had decided he had had enough fun for one day. And he must have laughed to himself, if rams ever laugh, at the funny manner in which he had butted Captain Ben head over heels into the ditch.