“What barrel?”
“It ran into the cornfield when it heard you coming. But it’ll come out again if I whistle.”
Here was my chance to have some fun. Grabbing several big ears of corn, and scrooching in my barrel, I sort of poked the new ears on top of me. This made it look as though the barrel was full of green corn. Then, taking short steps, with my feet out of sight, and one eye fastened to a slit in the staves, I went out where the audience was.
Poppy almost fell over at sight of the “walking barrel.” As for smarty, his eyes stuck out like warts on a squash. But not being completely and hopelessly dumb, he caught on as I made a circle of the truck. And mad! Say, when I did the jack-in-the-box stuff on him, with the same kind of a hee-haw that he had handed to us at the bank, I thought he’d peg the whole truck at me.
“He’s heading for Mrs. O’Mally’s house to get a load of cucumbers,” I told Poppy, when the truck had gone on down the dusty country road.
“The dickens! Do you suppose he’ll take all she’s got and make us wait?”
“We paid her for four bushels with the promise that they’d be ready for us any time after four o’clock. And from what I know of her I don’t think she’ll go back on her word.”
“Just the same,” says Poppy, “I’d like to make sure. For we need those cucumbers. So, as you were going back there anyway to borrow a nightgown, let’s follow him. We needn’t show ourselves.”
Winding up our legs, we soon were back within sight of the stone house. And sure enough, as I had told Poppy, the canning factory truck was pulled up beside the cucumber patch. Ducking into a cornfield that skirted the big patch, we stopped at the sound of voices.
“No,” says Mrs. O’Mally, “them four baskets are sold. I can’t let ye have ’em.”