This suited Flossie exactly, and soon she had taken her place in the wheelbarrow. Freddie grasped the handles, but his sister was almost more of a load than he had bargained for. Still he was a sturdy little chap, and he managed to stagger on, wheeling Flossie toward the brook.
There was a smooth place on a little knoll near the brook where Freddie intended to set up his wheelbarrow sawmill. Toward this place he wheeled Flossie, and all might have gone well had it not been for the fact that the ground was covered with those slippery pine needles.
Freddie managed to wheel his sister up the slope, and he was just going to set the barrow down and tell Flossie to get out so he could turn it over and make a saw of it, when his feet slipped. He lurched forward, gave the wheelbarrow a push, and, an instant later, it turned over, and Flossie, sliding on the slippery, brown pine needles, began to go down the slope and straight toward the brook, just back of the dam.
Freddie, too, sat down hard and suddenly, but though the breath was knocked out of him for a moment, he managed to pick himself up and to cry:
“Mother! Mother! Come quick! Flossie’s fallen into the brook and she’ll be carried over the dam!”
And, as he called, into the water at the foot of the pine needle hill splashed poor Flossie Bobbsey!
CHAPTER X—A SUDDEN STORM
While Flossie and Freddie were having such fun at the real sawmill, and before Freddie had, by accident, upset Flossie down the pine needle bank into the brook above the mill dam, Bert and Nan were trudging along through the woods on their way to the chestnut grove, about which Jim Denton had told them.
“Aren’t you glad we came to Cedar Camp, Bert?” asked Nan.
“I sure am!” answered her brother. “It’s like having two vacations in the same year. We had fun out West, and we’ll have fun here.”