"You must have seen a good many others on your journey from Colorado,"
Mrs. Ladybug ventured. "It's a long way from there to here, I suppose."

"I suppose it is," Mr. P. Bug murmured. He seemed to be a bit impatient,
as if he were in haste to return to his work and didn't care to talk any
longer.

"I suppose you were weeks on the road," Mrs. Ladybug went on. "Are you
going back to Colorado after you've finished helping Farmer Green with
the potato crop?"

"Colorado!" he blurted. "I don't know where that place is. I've never
been there in all my life."

IX

THAT CARPETBAG

MR. P. BUG'S statement amazed Mrs. Ladybug. He said he had never been in
Colorado. More than that, he declared he didn't even know where the
place was.

Now, Peppery Polly Bumblebee had told Mrs. Ladybug that Mr. P. Bug was
no stranger in Pleasant Valley. But Mrs. Ladybug had not believed what
she said. Even hearing Mr. Bug's own words, Mrs. Ladybug couldn't help
doubting them.

"Can it be true--" she asked him--"can it be true that you've never been
off this farm?"

Mr. Bug quite plainly wished that she would go away and stop bothering
him.

"It can be--it _is_ true," he replied carelessly.

At last Mrs. Ladybug had to believe what she heard.

"Then you're a fraud!" she cried. '"You're a cheat! For I read on your
carpetbag, when we met in the orchard, 'P. Bug. Colorado.'"

"Oh!" said Mr. Bug with a smile. "Oh! So _that's_ where you got your odd
notion. I wondered how you happened to make such a mistake."

"A perfectly natural mistake, I'm sure!" Mrs. Ladybug exclaimed
indignantly.

"Well, I dare say it is," he admitted. "But you see, that's not my
carpetbag. At least, I didn't get it new. It belonged to my
great-great-great-grandfather. Indeed, I'm not sure he wasn't even
still greater than I've said. _He_ lived in Colorado once--so I've been
told. But I was born and raised on this farm."

"If all this is true," said Mrs. Ladybug, "what were you doing with that
carpetbag? And why did you ask me the way to this potato patch?"

"I'm in a hurry to get to work," Mr. Bug remarked. "I'll answer just
this once. When we met in the orchard I had been away on a little
vacation. And Farmer Green's potato patch--so I learned--had been moved
since last year."

"Dear me!" Mrs. Ladybug wailed. "People will laugh at me for having made
such a serious mistake."

But Mr. P. Bug didn't say anything about that.

"Good-by!" he grunted. A