“There will be a real dog for me to play with at Grandpa’s,” he said. “And little calves and lambs—Harriet said so. Maybe you might get broken in the trunk, anyway. But I won’t like the real dog one bit more than I do you, and when we come back you can sleep with me every single night.”
The woolly dog seemed to think this was all right, and he took it so cheerfully that Sunny Boy felt better immediately.
Mr. Horton came home to lunch, which was unusual, and after lunch he and Mrs. Horton had to go downtown to see about the tickets and the parlor car seats for the trip the next day. Sunny Boy was to take his nap and be wide awake again by three o’clock, when the man was coming to take their trunk to the station.
Sunny Boy did not see how they were to find the trunk again if they once let it go, for surely no trunk could go all alone to Brookside. He resolved to ask Daddy. While he was wondering if there would be a piano in the parlor car—and he rather hoped there would and that he might be allowed to play on it—Sunny Boy fell asleep. Harriet, coming upstairs with a pile of clean clothes, woke him.
“Is it three o’clock?” he asked, afraid that he had missed the trunk man.
“Only half-past two,” answered Harriet. “Your mother will be back any minute now to lock the trunk. You can dress yourself, can’t you? I’ve another tablecloth to iron yet.”
Sunny Boy could dress himself, of course. Wandering into Mother’s room to borrow her hairbrush, he saw the little nickel alarm clock on the table. Mother must have meant to pack that, and in her hurry had forgotten. Sunny Boy remembered that Daddy had told him all country folk “rose with the chickens,” and upon inquiry he had learned that the chickens rose very early indeed—almost as soon as the sun. Sunny Boy thought it would be dreadful if he and Mother should oversleep their first morning at the farm and come downstairs to find the chickens up and the farmer people laughing at them. Yes, the alarm clock certainly must go.
He had not a very clear idea of how one went about it to set an alarm clock, but Daddy, he remembered, always wound the little pegs in the back. So Sunny Boy trustingly wound all the pegs he saw, as tight as they would turn, and tucked the clock away down deep in one of the corner holes Aunt Bessie had left in the trunk.
