These and other remarks like them met the suspicious ears of the driver as he jerked his team to a standstill.
"Hey, what's the matter with you?" he hailed them. "Have you got to stand right in the middle of the road? Can't you move over some?"
At this Mollie wriggled out from under the car and stood up, facing him. Her face was flushed from restrained mirth, but it might well have been the flush of indignation.
"If we could don't you suppose we would?" she queried, rather incoherently. "Do you think I'm doing this for fun?" Then she abruptly disappeared from sight again. The abruptness was caused by the terrible fear that if she stood looking at that sour old visage another moment she would have to spoil everything by laughing.
As for the other girls, they were slowly turning purple in an effort to maintain the solemnity demanded by the occasion. A strange noise from beneath the car, promptly followed by a choked cough, didn't help them any, and they were relieved when their victim turned his suspicious gaze from them to the shallow ditch at the side of the road which was still muddy from the rain of the night before. The only hope he had of getting around them was to drive through this mud.
Without a word or a glance in their direction, he whipped up his team and started for the ditch. This was something the girls had not foreseen, and they were of no mind to let him get ahead of them again.
Grace and Amy flashed a distress signal to Betty, who stooped over Mollie's feet, the feet being all that could be seen of her, and cried with a peculiar inflection:
"I think you must have found the trouble by this time, Mollie, haven't you?"
Mollie took the hint and scrambled hurriedly to her feet.
"I think so," she said, then as her eyes swiftly took in the situation—the grim old man already struggling through the ditch intent on getting ahead of them—she jumped to her seat and started the engine. "All right," she cried gayly. "Come on, girls, jump in."