“Oh, there’ll be a kitchen, all right, and a dining-room—no, I guess we’ll eat on the porch. Wouldn’t it be a dandy place, though? Look at the view!”
“Fine,” said Laurie, without much enthusiasm, remembering the last uphill mile. “Don’t mind if I don’t come to see you often, though, do you?”
“Not a bit! Nobody asked you, anyway.”
“You could live on nuts,” murmured Polly, “and could have shaggy-barks for breakfast and beech-nuts for dinner and—”
“Grape-nuts for supper,” said Laurie, coming to the rescue.
“And you could call the place the Squirrel-Cage,” suggested Bob.
And that reminded Mae of a story her father had told of a man who had lived in the woods farther down the river some years before, and who ate nothing but nuts and things he found in the forest. “He lived all alone in a little cabin he’d built, and folks said he was a deserter from the army, and—”
“What army?” George asked.
“The Northern Army, of course.”
“I thought you might mean the Salvation Army. Then this was quite awhile ago, wasn’t it?”