“My geese! My prize geese!” shouted the overalled man, adding what he thought of Tom’s and Billy’s intelligence. “My pedigreed geese, you young idiots! I’ll teach you!”
“You ought to have made ’em wear their pedigrees around their necks,” Tom shouted back at the man.
“Oh, can they get away?” cried Louise. “Look!”
And Winona, looking, saw that their way back to the canoe was cut off by a dog—the traditional farmer’s dog of the comic papers. He was stationed on the bank, eying the canoe and the girls in it in a very threatening way, and most plainly only waiting till the boys came back to bite them.
Winona gave the canoe a determined push which landed it in midstream, and both girls began to paddle back by the way they had come, Winona because she had a plan, Louise because she was following Winona.
“We’ll meet them around this point, on the other side,” she explained to Louise. “I saw a glimpse of water on the other side, and I think the point of land the farm is on is like a peninsula.”
Sure enough, they discovered the criminals crouched romantically behind a clump of trees at the other side of the point of land. They were so well hidden that the girls would never have seen them if Billy had not stealthily waved a red handkerchief which he always carried for wigwagging. The girls paddled up as softly as they could, and the boys crawled out and waded to the canoe, crouching low. Nobody dared say anything till the canoe and its crew was well out and downstream again, far from farmers with dogs and pitchforks and no desire to listen to explanations.
“And we never even got those geese!” mourned Tom.
“Got those geese!” said Louise severely. “You oughtn’t to want to get pedigreed geese that belonged to a farmer—especially a farmer with that kind of a disposition.”
“He hasn’t any business to let tame geese go prowling around the country that way,” growled Billy, “the first day a fellow has leave to go shooting food for the Scouts at home! How were we to know they had a coat-of-arms and a family tree? They ought to have been kept at home, in their ancestral barnyard.”