“Here, Abe,” said Mr. Perriton. “Didn’t I hear something about your friends wanting to see Tom Moran? He’s up to Polk’s mill.”
That was enough. The boys started with the Firebird inside of ten minutes picking up Dorothy and Tavia on the way. But nobody thought to telephone to the mill man to ask him to hold the red-haired man until the Firebird party arrived.
It was over another rough road to Polk’s mill on Upper Creek. “Dear, dear,” complained Tavia, “I am half in doubt whether the geographers have got it right. Perhaps the world isn’t round. I don’t see how it can be when it is so awful bumpy!”
“You feel like Nat did, I guess,” chuckled Ned. “That was when my lovely brother was a whole lot younger than he is now—hey, Nat?”
“What’s the burn?” asked Nathaniel White, Esquire.
“’Member when Miss Baker put the poser to you in intermediate school? ’Member about it, boy?”
“Oh, that’s an old one,” grunted Nat.
“Let’s hear it—do,” cried Dorothy. “Did Nattie miss his lesson?”
“He wasn’t paying much attention, I reckon,” said Ned, just scaling a corner post as they took a turn, and scaring a squawking flock of hens almost into “nervous prosperity,” as Tavia called it. “Miss Baker was giving us fits in the physical geography line. She snaps one at Nat:
“‘What’s the shape of the earth, Nathaniel?’