"I can keep it down under the first floor stairs," said Bobby eagerly. "And I won't play with it only before school and at recess, Mother, honest."
So he was allowed to take the car, and he went early in order to have time for play before the nine o'clock bell. Meg hung on behind him and the twins watched them out of sight enviously. There was nothing in the world the twins desired so ardently as to go to school. They had been promised that they might start in the kindergarten the next term and they were already looking forward to that time.
"I want to play a new way," Bobby was explaining to Meg as he pedaled furiously. "You'll see—I thought it up all myself last night."
A crowd of boys swept forward to greet Bobby when he entered the school yard. Most of them had seen his car before—it had been a birthday present in February—but to several it was new and all admired it and wished for one exactly like it.
"Can't have any fun with it here," said Tim Roon, rather contemptuously.
Tim was apt to speak of the dark side of everything, and he had very good luck in finding a dark side to draw attention to.
"Yes, I can," insisted Bobby. "You'll see."
He went through the school yard, down to the end where an old-fashioned picket fence shut off the playground from a vacant lot that later would be divided off into the school gardens, a plot for each grade.
"What you going to do?" asked Tim Roon curiously.
The other children looked mystified, including Meg. She, too, wondered what Bobby could be planning to do.