Whereupon Cranny, so highly disgusted that he forgot diplomacy and the gentle art of persuasion, promptly upset Willie, and, seated on his wriggling form, tickled his neck with a blade of grass, at the same time expressing some very forcible views of his conduct, past and present.
“And I’ll see that you make a change, all right,” he announced, as he got up and walked away.
CHAPTER IV
THE RAMBLERS ARRIVE
“No use coming to the station to meet us, Cranny,” Bob Somers had written, “for I don’t really know the exact time we’ll land in Tacoma. Only this much is certain: it will be on Thursday.”
And Thursday had arrived.
Cranny worked all day in a fever of impatience. Every footstep in the corridor set his heart to thumping; every hand laid upon the door-knob made him start with eager expectation.
But the day wore on, and still the Ramblers did not appear.
“I never knew Bob Somers to fail in his word yet,” grumbled Cranny, at the dinner table.
“One of those word-as-good-as-his-bond chaps, I suppose,” grinned Willie, surreptitiously wiping up with a corner of his napkin some soup he had spilled. “He must be a crackerjack.”
“I do declare, Willie is falling more and more into the way of using those outlandish expressions,” sighed Mr. Beaumont to his wife, a pleasant-looking lady whose hair was just beginning to show faint traces of gray.