“He doesn’t want you to wreck it,” I caught on. “He’s yelling breakfast.”
So we saved the engine further immediate suffering by turning off the switch and went in to breakfast, where we managed heroically to get on the outside of four dozen fried eggs, more or less, and the husky end of a hill of bacon. There was other stuff, too—a swell breakfast, let me tell you. Talking and cooking were sort of twin talents with “Ma” Doane, as we now called her. Our tasters put us wise to that, all right.
During the bacon-and-egg vanishing contest we heard about “Ma’s” dream, which sort of explained why her mind, usually so jammed full of worry, was now taking things easy. She believed in dreams, it seemed. And in this particular dream she had seen “Miss Ruth” in a pansy garden. Pansies, of course, were good luck. So everything was all right. More than that, the dreamer had been handed eight pansies.
“Which means,” the dream was made clear to us, “that Miss Ruth is coming on the eighth of the month, which is to-day, instead of on the seventh.”
Poppy got my eyes and grinned. The big monkey! He can be as crazy as the next fellow when he tries.
“I had a dream, too,” he laughed. “I dreamt that I was picking hairy pumpkins, and when I woke up I had Jerry by the topknot.”
“That’s nothing,” says I, not to be outdone. “In my dream I was a horse buyer. But I turned you down, kid, on account of your long ears. Hee-haw! Hee-haw!”
But our clever little act was wasted. For Ma wasn’t listening to us at all. In her superior Danver etiquette, or whatever you call it, she was giving poor Pa “Hail Columbia” for guzzling coffee out of his saucer.
“I see,” she then yanked the conversation around to us, “that you boys know how to run Pa’s car.”
“We made a special study of snails in school,” I grinned.