“Oh, all right, Coz, if it will make you happy. I wish, sometimes, I were lame, halt and old enough—to know.” Whereat he stopped the machine and insisted on old Peter doing as the girls had suggested.
It was no easy matter to get the trees, and the bunches of greens, securely fastened to the back of the auto, but it was finally accomplished. Peter was profuse in his thanks, for the greens had been specially ordered, he said, and he was already late in delivering them.
“Which way do you go?” asked Nat.
“Out to the Squire’s,” replied Peter. “But that road is soft, I wouldn’t ask you take it.”
“Oh, I guess we can make it,” proposed Nat. “The Fire Bird is not quite a locomotive.”
“She goes like a bird, sure enough,” affirmed Peter. “But that road is full of ditches.”
“We will try them, at any rate,” insisted Nat, as he turned from the main road to a narrow stretch of white track that cut through woods and farm lands.
“If we are fortunate enough not to meet anything,” said Dorothy. “But I have always been afraid of a single road, bound with ditches.”
“Of course,” growled Nat, “there comes Terry with his confounded cows.”
Plowing along, his head down and his whip in hand came Terry, the half-witted boy who, Winter and Summer, drove the cows from their field or barn to the slaughter house. He never raised his head as Nat tooted the horn, and by the time the machine was abreast of the drove of cattle, Nat was obliged to make a quick swerve to avoid striking the animals.