“Well, everything looks well for a big peach crop,” said Mr. Watson, as the truck was started off on the road to Hitchville.
As the truck would have to travel more slowly than the faster pleasure car, Mr. Bobbsey would not leave Cloverbank for several minutes yet. At the end of this time the Bobbsey twins and their father and mother were on the highway, over which they had come a few days before in the driving rain storm.
“You take the children out to the peach market, and I’ll do some shopping,” Mrs. Bobbsey told her husband. “You can stop for me on the way home.”
The peach market was in a big open lot near a railroad siding, on which stood many freight cars. Even before the children reached the place they could smell the sweet perfume of the peaches.
And such a busy place as the peach market was! At first Bert and the others could make little of it. There were so many motor and horse-drawn trucks, so many men shouting back and forth, so many freight cars with an engine puffing up every now and then to haul them away—there was so much confusion that the Bobbsey twins did not know what it was all about.
A man would jump up on a box or a barrel and shout something. Other men would shout something back at him. Then they would wave their hands, they would write down something on pieces of paper, and move away. Then the same thing would happen in another place.
“What are they doing?” Nan asked her father.
“Selling loads of peaches by auction to the highest bidder,” was the answer. “There is Mr. Watson—watch him.”
The children saw their farmer friend standing up on the seat of his big motor truck, which was piled high with baskets of peaches, some of which the children had picked. About Mr. Watson’s truck were gathered a number of men, some of whom were lifting the edges of the covers over the baskets to look in at the kind of peaches grown at Cloverbank.
Then followed much talk and shouting, until at last Mr. Watson was heard to exclaim: