Part 5 (1/2)
”Firemen have to slide on ropes!” Freddie spoke up, recovering himself, ”and I'm going to be a fireman. I was one that time, because I tried to save somebody and didn't care if I got hurted!”
”You are a brave little boy,” Aunt Sarah a.s.sured him. ”You just sit here with sister while I try to get that naughty Frisky before she spoils the garden.”
By this time the calf was almost lost to them, as she plunged in and out of the pretty hedges. Fortunately Bert and Harry just turned in the gate.
”Runaway calf! Runaway calf!” called the boys. ”Stop the runaway!” and instantly a half-dozen other boys appeared, and all started in pursuit.
But Frisky knew how to run, besides she had the advantage of a good start, and now she just dashed along as if the affair was the biggest joke of her life.
”The river! The river!” called the boys
”She'll jump in!” and indeed the pretty Meadow Brook, or river, that ran along some feet lower than the Bobbseys' house, on the other side of the highway, was now dangerously near the runaway calf.
There was a heavy thicket a few feet further up, and as the boys squeezed in and out of the bushes Frisky plunged into this piece of wood.
”Oh, she's gone now, sure!” called Harry ”Listen!”
Sure enough there was a splas.h.!.+
Frisky must be in the river!
It took some time to reach the spot where the fall might have sounded from, and the boys made their way heavy-hearted, for all loved the pretty little Frisky.
”There's footprints!” Bert discovered emerging from the thick bush.
”And they end here!” Harry finished, indicating the very brink of the river.
”She's gone!”
”But how could she drown so quickly?” Bert asked.
”Guess that's the channel,” Tom Mason, one of the neighbors' boys, answered.
”Listen! Thought I heard something in the bushes!” Bert whispered.
But no welcome sound came to tell that poor Frisky was hiding in the brushwood. With heavy hearts the boys turned away. They didn't even feel like talking, somehow. They had counted on bringing the calf back in triumph.
When Flossie and Freddie saw them coming back without Frisky they just had to cry and no one could stop them.
”I tried to be a fireman!” blubbered Freddie. ”I didn't care if the rope hurted my hands either!”
”If only I didn't go in to see the chickens nests,” Flossie whimpered, ”I could have helped Freddie!”
”Never you mind, little 'uns,” Dinah told them. ”Dinah go and fetch dat Frisky back to-morrer. See if she don't. You jest don't cry no more, but eat you supper and take a good sleep, 'cause we're goin' to have a picnic to-morrer you knows, doesn't youse?”
The others tried to comfort the little ones too, and Uncle Daniel said he knew where he could buy another calf just like Frisky, so after a little while Freddie felt better and even laughed when Martha made the white cat Fluffy and Snoop play ball in the big long kitchen.
”I'm goin' to pray Frisky will come back,” Nan told her little brother when she kissed him good-night, ”and maybe the dear Lord will find her for you.”
”Oh, yes, Nannie, do ask Him,” pleaded Freddie, ”and tell Him--tell Him if He'll do it this time, I'll be so good I won't never need to bother Him any more.”