Page:BM Bower - Her Prairie Knight.djvu/14

 little boy. Dorman, do you hear me? Redmond, do take that child down! How I wish Parks were here. I shall have nervous prostration within a fortnight."

Sir Redmond Hayes plucked at the white collar, and the small boy retired between two masculine forms of no mean proportions. His voice, however, rose higher.

"You'll get all the fireworks you want, young man, without all that hullabaloo," remarked the driver, whom Dorman had been told, at the depot twenty miles back, he must call his Uncle Richard.

"I love storms," came cheerfully from the rear seat—but the voice was not the prim voice of "auntie." "Do you have thunder and lightning out here, Dick?"

"We do," assented Dick. "We don't ship it from the East in refrigerator cars, either. It grows wild."

The cheerful voice was heard to giggle.

"Richard," came in tired, reproachful accents from a third voice behind him, "you were reared in the East. I trust you have not formed the pernicious habit of speaking slightingly of your birthplace." 12