“An’ killing flies,” added Sunny Boy. He turned so that he could talk to his mother more easily.
“You said you’d tell me,” he urged her. “Why did you laugh when Daddy said the fly would starve?”
Mrs. Horton smiled.
“Oh, because he likes to tell about the first summer we were married, and I wasn’t a very experienced housekeeper,” she explained. “We were closing the apartment the day before we were to go to the country for a month, and I found a little live mouse in a trap I had set. I opened the trap and let him go and when your father asked me why I did that, I answered that I couldn’t bear to think of the poor creature starving to death.”
Aunt Bessie and Miss Martinson laughed, but Sunny was puzzled.
“It would be mean to let him starve,” he declared. “Wouldn’t it, Daddy?”
“Well, yes,” admitted Mr. Horton. “But you see, Sunny Boy, we catch mice to prevent them from eating up our good clean food. And Mother let the mouse go, and he probably lived on our pantry shelves that summer. What we should have done was to drown him.”
“Oh,” said Sunny Boy.
While he thought this over the car purred through the city streets into the suburbs and finally out into the open country. The road was dry and white, but not too dusty, for a recent rain had laid the dust.
“I’m getting hungry,” announced Mrs. Horton. “We had such an early breakfast that an eleven o’clock lunch wouldn’t be out of the way at all. Let’s keep on the look-out for a cool shady spot, and when we find it, stop and have a picnic.”