Belles on their Toes

eighty pounds heavier than he. "Why don't you ast me what we're doing?"
    "Take it easy, Tom," the chauffeur humored him. "You're too tough for me. I'm not opening my mouth."
    "You'd better not, neither," said Tom, looking significantly into the cart. "When I got through with you, you wouldn't dast to close it."
    It took a couple of hours to fill the box. Tom and the boys brought the wagon home and dumped it behind the back fence, where the pile was out of sight.
    "We'll go out every afternoon," Tom told Frank and Bill, "as long as you behave yourself. If you ain't good, I'm going to leave you home."
    The two boys, who had enjoyed themselves as much as Tom, promised they'd be good.
    "Don't say nothing to the girls," Tom warned. "I think Martha would take it all right. But the Doochess would say it hurt her social standin'."
    The boys got home in the afternoons ahead of the high school girls, and thus could get away without being noticed. It took a good deal longer the second day to fill the box, because they were covering the same territory. On subsequent days, they were forced to go farther and farther away from home. But the pile behind the fence grew steadily. And even after they knew the pile was high enough, they found excuses to go after more.
    "We might need some for next year," Tom pointed out. "And every year there is fewer horses."
    They soon found out which were the most productive streets, and how many days they should allow to elapse before going back over a street. Sometimes there’d be an argument about whether it would pay to go around a certain block, and the person who had advocated the detour would either crow or eat crow, depending on the pickings.
    "Maybe we did go up there yesterday," Tom would say. "But I see sparrers. And where sparrers is, is what we're looking for."
    Tom was invariably right in selecting the streets. He may have had some sort of sixth sense. Or, as Frank and Bill suspected, he may have cased the neighborhood during the morning, while they were in school, so as to impress them with his infallibility. At any rate, he swore he saw birds when neither of them did, and he could predict with exactness what would be found around a curve in the street.
    The sport—because that's what they considered it—might have continued for weeks, if they hadn't bumped into Ernestine. They had carefully avoided the streets she and Martha took coming home from school. But on that particular afternoon, Ernestine had been given a ride part of the way home, and was off her accustomed path. She was walking with a fellow.
    The boys and Tom didn't see her approaching. Bill had maneuvered the express wagon into position, and Tom and Frank were shoveling.
    "Henc, henc," Tom was chuckling. "I tole you I seen sparrers. You can't fool old eagle eye. This is always a good place. This is an every day street from now on."
    "That's eleven for Tom, and only five for us," Bill said enviously. "He can spot it a mile away."
    "I'm the champeen," Tom crowed. "Ain't no doubt about that. It's the biggest one today, too. Those ones of yours we might as well of throwed back."

    He looked up then and saw Ernestine.
    '"Duck," he warned, squatting behind the cart, "or 'she'll have us beheadet when she gets us back to the palace."
    Ernestine's friend was intent in a conversation. Frank and Bill had never seen him before, and he wasn't paying any attention to them. Ernestine had seen them and was watching them out of the corner of her eye. She was blushing and furious. She held her head high, and she tried to make believe she wass listening to every word of the conversation.
    Frank and Bill turned their backs, because they didn't want to embarrass her any more than they already had. Tom, peeking guiltily from behind the cart, started mumbling about how the robbers at the seed store wanted to charge $12.
    Ernestine passed, without her friend's being aware that she knew them. But as she walked down the street, she didn't feel right about it. No matter what they were doing, they were kith and kin. It was a cheap thing to pretend not to know them. And, after all, they were out collecting what they were collecting to save the family money.
    "Just a second," she told her friend. "Wait up." She turned and walked back to the wagon, and looked into it.
    "Hello, Frank," she said loudly. "Hello, Bill. Hello, Tom."
    They said hello, Ernestine.
    "That's a fine load," she told them. "I think you'd better take it home, now."
    They said