watched Harry disappear around the corner. “My, but this is an exciting town!” he muttered. “I wish that cat would fall off the porch, or something else would happen.” But nothing did, and presently Harry was back again, and the clock at the back of the store struck six in wheezy tones. The sun was getting low, and long shafts of amber light swept down the road that wound up the hill toward the west. A train whistled in the distance.

“That’s Jennie,” said Chub. “Bennie will be along pretty soon now; Cæsar and Bennie and Jennie. I’m getting awfully hungry. Do you remember any of the messages Mrs. Peel left for Jennie?”

Harry did, and to prove it she enumerated them. Chub applauded her memory.

“All I remember,” he said, “was something about sparks.”

It was almost twenty minutes later when the white horse and the dilapidated buggy rattled around the corner and pulled up for a moment in front of the watering-trough. In the buggy sat Bennie and no one else. He grinned joyously.

“She didn’t come,” he announced. “Get ap!”