oared. "Well, why didn't you bring a dynamite
bomb and touch that off when you arrived? Lucky for you that dog didn't
go for you. He'll take a piece out of some of you one of these days."
(Colonel Witham did not observe that the dog, at this moment, tail
between legs, was flattening himself out like a flounder, trying to
squeeze himself underneath the board walk.) "What do you want here,
anyway?"

"Some bottled soda, Colonel," said the youngest boy, in a tone that
would seem to indicate that the colonel was their best friend. "Bottled
soda for the crowd. My treat."

"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, Caesar, come here!"

The colonel gave a sharp whistle.

But Caesar, 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.

"Hello," said t