“Squirrel much! I’m going to be so quick with my gun that the bold brigands will wish they had stayed with Uncle Albert. As for lassoing—I am some pumpkins myself with the rope. Look at this!” and twirling the gunnysack around with the lunch serving as ballast, Skeeter caught his chum neatly around the neck.
“Oh, oh! You’ll mash the sandwiches!” wailed the others.
“Let’s sit down and eat ’em up now,” suggested Skeeter. “I am tired of being made the beast of burden. I believe in distribution of labor.”
“Why, Skeeter, we haven’t walked a mile yet, and it can’t be more than ten o’clock.”
“Well, then, my tumtum must be fast. I shall have to regulate it. It tells me it is almost twelve.” No one had a watch so there was no way to prove the time except by the shadows, and Skeeter declared that the shadows on the mountain perforce must slant even at twelve.
“Let’s eat part of the lunch,” suggested Lucy. “That will keep poor Skeeter from starving and lighten the load some, too. There is no telling what time it is, but if we are hungry I can’t see that it makes much difference what time it is. I’m starved myself almost.”
“Me, too,” chorused the others.
They ate only half, prudently putting the rest back in the gunnysack for future reference.
“Gee, I feel some better,” sighed Skeeter, whose appetite was ever a marvel to his friends since it never seemed to have the slightest effect on his extreme leanness. Oscar always said: “That there young Marster Skeeter eats so much it makes him po’ to carry it.”