“Look here, Sunny Boy, your brains will be absolutely baked!” Aunt Bessie descended on him from the back porch. “My dear child, this yard is the warmest place in the city in the morning. Your mother asked me to see what you were doing. Why don’t you go out in front and play where it is shady?”
“With you?” asked Sunny Boy happily.
Aunt Bessie sat down on one end of the wagon which tipped perilously, and hugged him.
“No, lambie, not with me,” she answered. “I must run home and help Harriet pack another box, and then I am to meet Betty Martinson and buy a porch swing. After that, let’s see—after that I have to give a little girl a music lesson. But when we get to the seashore I’ll play with you.”
“All right,” agreed Sunny Boy sensibly. “But couldn’t you stay a minute, Auntie?”
“Not half a minute, honey.” Aunt Bessie rose and smoothed out her pretty blue linen frock. “You run along now and don’t go far away, because it will be lunch time before you know it.”
A big black ant crawled across the cement walk at Sunny’s feet.
“I wonder what Jimmie is doing now?” said Sunny Boy aloud, remembering how careful Jimmie always was not to step on the tiniest ant.
Jimmie was the nineteen year old boy who helped Grandpa Horton farm in summer and who went to an agricultural college in winter. Sunny Boy and he had grown to be great friends during the month Sunny and his mother had spent at Brookside, which was the name of the farm where Grandpa and Grandma Horton lived.
Sunny Boy was named for his grandfather, “Arthur Bradford Horton,” as you may have read in my first book about him called, “Sunny Boy in the Country.” His father and mother called him “Sunny Boy” because he was usually such a cheerful laddie. Even when he got into scrapes—and in the month he spent at the farm he lost his grandfather’s Liberty Bonds and had a horse run away with him—the troubles were somehow straightened out for him and left him smiling again.