"Being thick as molasses, they're naturally sweet on each other," chirped Cooper.
"Hi! Hi!" cried Tuttle. "There you go! Have a peanut for that."
"No, nut for me; I shell nut take it," declined Chipper.
"It's a real case of Damon and Pythias," remarked Stone, watching the two lads coming up the walk.
"Or David and Jonathan," said Eliot.
Phil Springer, the taller of the pair, with light hair, blue eyes, and long arms, looked at a distance the better qualified to toe the slab in a baseball game; but Rodney Grant was a natural athlete, whose early life on his father's Texas ranch had given him abounding health, strength, vitality, and developed in him qualities of resourcefulness and determination. Grant had come to Oakdale late the previous autumn, and was living with his aunt, an odd, seclusive spinster, by the name of Priscilla Kent.
Two girls, sauntering down the path with their arms about each other, met the approaching boys, and paused a moment to chat with them.
"Phil's sister is struck on our gay cowboy," observed Cooper, grinning.
"I rather guess Lela Barker is some smit on him, too," put in Sile Crane. "That's sorter natteral, seein' as how he rescued her from drowndin' when she was carried over the dam on a big ice-cake in the Jinuary freshet. That sartainly made him the hero of Oakdale, and us fellers who'd been sayin' he was a fake had to pull in our horns."
"The real hero of that occasion," declared Hooker maliciously, "was a certain cheap chap by the name of Bunk Lander, who plunged into the rapids below the dam, with a rope tied round his waist, and saved them both."