“Well!” declared Dorothy, “I hope when he gets home they will be as glad to see him as that message intimated.”
“Well, I shouldn’t worry and get wrinkled!” shrugged Tavia.
“I guess we’ll never know about that,” said Ned.
“It’s like one of those serial stories in the papers, ‘continued in our next’—and you always miss your copy of the next number,” said Nat. “I’ve a dozen different plots ‘hanging fire’ in my mind that I never will get to know how they finish up.”
“Learn to read books, then,” advised his brother, “and stop littering up your mind with such useless stuff.”
“Wow!” exclaimed Nat. “You talk like Professor Grubber. Oh, I say! Did you hear of that one they had on Old Grubs in class one day? He was discussing organic and inorganic kingdoms. Says he:
“‘Now, if I should shut my eyes—so—and drop my head—so—and remain perfectly still, you would say I was a clod. But I move. I leap. Then what do you call me?’
“And Poley Gray says, quite solemnly, ‘A clodhopper, sir.’ It got them all,” concluded the slangy Nat. “Even Old Grubs himself had to laugh.”
After that two-hour hold-up of their train the party found that the speed at which they traveled was greatly increased. Each engineer in turn tried to make up a bit of that handicap, and the travelers were tossed about in their berths that night in rather a disturbing manner.
Mrs. Petterby would not have gone to bed at all had it not been for Dorothy’s encouragement; she would have sat up with her pullet in her lap, and her bonnet firmly tied under her chin.