“Course. I like to build in the sand.”
The three children set to work to build a fort, and as Sunny Boy could go down and scoop up water in Ellen’s pail, they had plenty of damp sand to make the walls shape well. They made an elaborate fort with five gates and a high wall, and they were molding soldiers for it when Mrs. Horton and Aunt Bessie came and found them.
“Betty’s getting into her bathing suit,” Aunt Bessie announced. “Hello, chicks, you seem to be having a fine time. And Sunny Boy has seven freckles on his nose already.”
Aunt Bessie’s small nephew tried to look down at his nose to see the seven freckles, of which he was prepared to be rather proud, but, as the nose was very little and, as all noses are, very close to his eyes, he could scarcely see the nose, much less the freckles that might be on it.
Sunny Boy introduced his new friends politely, though they had to tell him their last names.
“Ellen and Ralph Gray,” repeated Mrs. Horton. “Then I think you must be the little folk who live in the white house on the street next but one to ours. I met your mother in the embroidery store this morning when I was matching some wool. It is nice you live so near Sunny Boy.”
“Is the water cold? Aren’t you lazy people going in?” asked Aunt Betty, dancing before them in her pretty black and white bathing suit. She held her rubber cap in her hand.
“Sunny and I are going,” declared Mr. Horton scrambling to his feet. “Come on, Son, we must get dressed. ’Scuse us, friends.”
Mrs. Horton and Aunt Bessie decided to stay under the umbrellas and knit, and Ellen and Ralph had an errand to do in the town for their mother. So Sunny Boy and Daddy raced each other up to the bungalow and found their bathing suits neatly spread out for them in the built-in bathing houses next to the side porch.
“Can you swim, Daddy?” Sunny Boy asked, struggling with his jersey.