“I’m going! I’m going right away!” Sunny assured the chipmunk hastily. “Daddy says you wood folks like to be alone. I wouldn’t hurt you, but I s’pose you don’t know that.”
He trotted along, eating the bananas as he went. There were so many things to look at and think about that sometimes he almost forgot the Liberty Bonds. Almost, but not quite.
“’Cause I just have to find ’em,” he told a blue jay that sat up in a tree and listened sympathetically. “I’m mose sure Grandpa didn’t look in the right place. An’ won’t he like it when I come home with them in my pocket!”
Sunny was so pleased with this idea that he gave a little shout and threw his cap up into the air, which so alarmed the blue jay that it quickly flew away.
Sunny Boy was marching steadily, hands in his pockets, when he saw something near a stone that made him stop to look. It was a turtle.
“Why didn’t you run?” Sunny demanded, picking up the turtle carefully, as he had seen Jimmie do. “Maybe you’re the one Grandpa carved his initials and the date on when he came here to live. Are you?”
The turtle kept his head obstinately in. Very likely he objected to being picked up and looked at so closely. Sunny brushed him off neatly with his clean handkerchief, and, sure enough, on the shell he found a date carved.
“I can’t read it,” mourned Sunny aloud. “But I guess you’re not Grandpa’s turtle, ’cause you haven’t any initials on you. I wish you’d put your head out, just once.”
But, though he put the turtle gently on the ground again and kept very still for at least five minutes, the queer, narrow little head stayed safely in its shell house. The turtle did not run away.
“Guess he thinks I’ll catch him if he runs,” thought Sunny. “I’d like to keep him if he was little. Jimmie says little turtles are nice to keep in the garden. Maybe I can find one on the way back, and build him a little house under Grandma’s rose bushes.”