a little shout and threw
his cap up into the air, which so alarmed the blue jay that it quickly
flew away.

Sunny Boy was marching steadily, hands in his pockets, when he saw
something near a stone that made him stop to look. It was a turtle.

"Why didn't you run?" Sunny demanded, picking up the turtle carefully, as
he had seen Jimmie do. "Maybe you're the one Grandpa carved his initials
and the date on when he came here to live. Are you?"

The turtle kept his head obstinately in. Very likely he objected to being
picked up and looked at so closely. Sunny brushed him off neatly with his
clean handkerchief, and, sure enough, on the shell he found a date
carved.

"I can't read it," mourned Sunny aloud. "But I guess you're not Grandpa's
turtle, 'cause you haven't any initials on you. I wish you'd put your
head out, just once."

But, though he put the turtle gently on the ground again and kept very
still for at least five minutes, the queer, narrow little head stayed
safely in its shell house. The turtle did not run away.

"Guess he thinks I'll catch him if he runs," thought Sunny. "I'd like to
keep him if he was little. Jimmie says little turtles are nice to keep in
the garden. Maybe I can find one on the way back, and build him a little
house under Grandma's rose bushes."

Sunny went on, and soon he was sure that he was coming to the place where
he had seen his kite fall. To be sure, the inside of the woods looked
very different from the outside, and Sunny began to understand why he and
Grandfather had not found the bonds as easily as they had hoped to.
Still, he felt he was "getting warm" as they say in the games of seeking,
and he began to look about him closely.

"It was right here--" His apple fell out of his blouse and he stooped to
pick it up. He sprang up with a shriek and ran screaming toward an
opening in the woods.

"It was a snake--a great, big, nasty, bitey snake!" he sobbed. "I put my
hand right on it--all slippy and cold!"

He looked back--was it a snake after all? What was that curved black
thing that lay there so quietly at the foot of a tree?

Then Sunny Boy did a very brave thing indeed. He was all alone, remember,
and there was no one to laugh at him had he gone on home believing that
he had touched a snake. But he liked to be very sure in his own mind, and
he went back, cautiously and ready to run if a twig snapped, but back,
nevertheless, to the place where he thought he had seen the snake