“Hi, that’s good! Remember it, and put it in your speech,” Bennie cried. “Wish I could think of something funny. Gosh, you never can when you want to.” He looked woebegone.
“You get up with a face like that, and you’ll make a hit like Charlie Chaplin,” Spider assured him.
The boys cheered up a bit, however, as the rain ceased and the car sped on up a good road, through the rich fields of the Willamette valley, mile after mile of prune orchards and cherry orchards and hop plantations and Loganberry fields where the canes, tied in rows to wires, stretched for hundreds of yards on either side of the road.
Presently they came to a “ranch” (as everybody out there calls his farm or orchard), where the cherries were being picked, and the doctor stopped the car. The Stones, who were right behind, stopped too, and everybody got out.
“Sell us some cherries?” asked the doctor.
“Got anything to pick ’em in?” asked the owner of the orchard.
“Sure—the radiator pails.”
“All right, you can pick all you want in that first tree, for fifty cents. Hold on, though. Not that cute little feller there. I don’t want my tree busted down.”
“I’ll stand below and you can throw ’em into my mouth,” Dumpling laughed.
They got the collapsible canvas pails which were carried in the cars to fill the radiators with, and began to pick. The cherries were huge things, of a deep, wonderful, winey red, and almost melted in your mouth. Bennie and Spider had never seen nor tasted such cherries, and they ate two for every one they picked. The pails were full in five minutes, at that, and still the tree hardly seemed touched.