"Bottled monkey-shines and tomfoolery!" muttered Colonel Witham, arising slowly from his chair. "I wish it would choke that young Joe Warren. Never saw him when he wasn't up to something."
But he went inside with them and served their order; scowling upon them as they drank.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Making a fifty mile run, Colonel," replied one of the boys, whose features indicated that he was an elder brother of the boy who had previously spoken. "Tom and Bob—you remember them—are setting the pace on their tandem for Arthur and Joe and me. Whew, but we came up a-flying. Well, good day, we're off. You may see Tim Reardon by and by. We left him down the road with a busted tire."
They were away, with a shout and a whirl of dust.
"Hm!" growled the colonel. "I'll set the dog on Tim Reardon if he comes up the way they did. Here, Cæsar, come here!"
The colonel gave a sharp whistle.
But Cæsar, a yellow mongrel of questionable breeds, did not appear. A keen vision might have seen this canine terror to evildoers poke a shrinking muzzle a little way from beneath the board walk, emit a frightened whine and disappear.
Colonel Witham dozed again, and again slumber overtook him. He did not stir when Grannie Thornton, recovered from her attack of rheumatism, appeared at a window and shook a table-cloth therefrom; nor when Bess Thornton, dancing out of the doorway, whisked past his chair and seated herself at the edge of the piazza.
The girl's keen blue eyes perceiving, presently, an object in the distance looking like a queer combination of boy and bicycle, she ran out from the dooryard as it approached. Tim Reardon, an undersized, sharp-eyed youngster, rather poorly dressed and barefoot, wheeling his machine laboriously along, was somewhat of a mournful-looking figure. The girl held up a warning hand as he approached.