“Don’t be a goose!” half laughed Dorothy. “Look out. See if you see what I see.”
“Why, Doro! it’s Joe and Roger I do believe!”
“I was sure it was,” returned her friend. “What can those boys be doing now?”
“Well, what they are doing seems plain enough,” said Tavia. “What they are going to do is the moot question, my dear. You never know what a boy will do next, or what he did last; you’re only sure of what he is doing just now.”
What the young brothers of Dorothy Dale were doing at that moment was easily explained. They were riding down the long slope of the gray road toward North Birchland, racing with the train Dorothy and Tavia were on. The vehicle upon which the boys were riding was a nondescript thing composed of a long plank, four wheels, a steering arrangement of more or less dependence, and a soap box.
In the soap box was a bag, and unless the girls were greatly mistaken Joe and Roger Dale had been nutting over toward The Beeches, and the bag was filled with hickory nuts and chestnuts in their shells and burrs.
Roger, who was the youngest, and whom Dorothy continued to look upon as a baby, occupied the box with the nuts. Joe, who was fifteen, straddled the plank with his feet on the rests and steered. The boys’ vehicle was going like the wind. It looked as though a small stone in the road, or an uncertain jerk by Joe on the steering lines, would throw the contraption on which they rode sideways and dump out the boys.
“Enough to give one heart disease,” said Tavia. “I declare! small brothers are a nuisance. When I’m at home in Dalton I have to wear blinders so as not to see my kid brothers at their antics.”
“If something should happen, Tavia!” murmured Dorothy.
“Something is always happening. But not often is it something bad,” said Tavia, coolly. “‘There’s a swate little cherub that sits up aloft, and kapes out an eye for poor Jack,’ as the Irish tar says. And there is a similar cherub looking out for small boys—or a special providence.”