A spotted gander! Did you ever hear of one? No? Well, you’re going to hear about one pretty soon.
CHAPTER II
A HOUSE OF MYSTERY
As though to completely take the joy out of life for us, no other cars came along, as we had expected they would. The sway-backed roadster with the crazy name and queer-looking driver seemed to have the whole highway to itself. And that was strange, we thought, puzzled.
Why had the road been closed to all the cars except this one? Or, to put it another way, if the road had been closed to the general traffic, for certain reasons, how had the one car gotten permission to come through?
It was dusk now. And as though cheered up by the cooler air of early nightfall, the crickets and locusts were tuning it up to beat the cars. Or maybe, was my crazy thought, they were hooting at us in derision as we passed. I could imagine, as we trudged along, hungry and fagged out, that we looked not unlike some rare piece of junk that the cat had dragged in. I know I felt that way.
Once or twice we caught sight of a scuttling rabbit. And now that the bushes beside the hard road were lost in creeping shadows, I began to pick out moving eyes. Hunks of green glass set close together.
Poppy had joked with me about putting in the night here, though at the time neither of us had thought that we might in all fact have to do that very thing. But now the outlook was against us. We seemed to be a million miles from nowhere. Did snakes and sand lizards, I wondered, have green eyes? Br-r-r-r! If it came about, to our further grief, that we had no other choice than to stick it out all night in the open, it was my clever little decision to roost in a tree—that and nothing else but. I wasn’t so well supplied with spare legs and arms that I cared to run the chance of having one chawed off and hurriedly digested by some green-eyed monster while I snoozed on a bed of sand burs. I guess not.
Certainly, I checked up on the day’s adventures, so different from our dreams, a fellow’s fortunes were easily turned upsidedown. Only that morning we had set forth on our trip with lilting hearts, as the saying is. Everything was sunshine and chocolate drops. But were we lilting now? Not so you could notice it. I had the beaten feeling, as I dragged myself along, that I had lilted my last lilt.
“Poppy,” I suffered, feeling that it was time for some more nonsense, “if the worst comes to the worst, and I go down first, you can have my jigsaw and football shoes—only the jigsaw needs a new leather belt.”
“Merrily we roll along, roll along, roll along,” the other sang, to cheer me up.