“It’s Bob and the horse and wagon!” cried Sunny Boy.  “Now we’ll be all right.”

“Well, you do manage to get yourselves into a pickle every time, don’t you?” was Bob’s greeting when he drove up.  “Father sent me down to finish the fence alone and bring you up, and I couldn’t imagine where you could be.  Hurry up, kids, because I don’t like the looks of this water.  It will be coming in the wagon if it gets much higher.”

Bob helped them all in and then drove slowly to the Parkney house.  The horse had hard work to keep his footing in the water and ice, and he kept shaking his head as though he did not like it.  But they reached the house safely, and Mrs. Parkney gave the boys milk to drink and clean dry stockings to wear as though she were used to any emergency, as indeed she was.

“I guess you’ve had enough exploring for one day,” said Bob, as he drove the boys out to the head of the lane to get the half-past four o’clock trolley car.  “If it’s dull out here this summer, I mean to send for you, Sunny Boy, because excitement seems to follow you around.”

The same merry conductor was on the four-thirty trolley car, and he was much interested to hear about the day’s experiences.  So were the mothers and fathers when the boys reached home.

The next morning Daddy Horton telephoned Mr. Parkney to ask him if the brook had done any damage over night.  Mr. Parkney said that the old barn had been carried down past their farm and was completely wrecked.

“I’m glad we didn’t stay in it,” said Sunny Boy cheerfully.  “It must have been a freshet, Daddy.  Don’t you think it was?”

It was a freshet, of course, and Daddy Horton said so.

After that Saturday the weather grew warmer and warmer, and Sunny Boy began to think of summer.  What he did when school closed and what happened to him, we’ll have to tell you in another book, to be called “Sunny boy and his games.”

THE END