They rolled their wide eyes at almost impossible angles, and small Peggy sniffed audibly into a corner of her patched gingham apron.

"Yes, Stonie," answered Rose Mary judicially, while Everett's shoulders shook with mirth that he felt it best not to give way to in the face of the sympathetic Swarm, "you all must stay with Tobe, if he has to be buried, and go right back as fast as you can. Troubles must make us stay close by our friends."

"If I get much closer to him I'll throw up," sniffed Jennie, and her protest was echoed by a groan from Peggy into the apron, while the area which showed above its folds turned white at the prospect of being obliged to draw near to this brother in affliction.

"Yes, but you sicked Tobe, with the rest of us, and in this girls don't count. You've got to go back, smell or no smell, sick or no sick," announced the General firmly, in the decisive tones of one accustomed to be obeyed.

"Yes, Stonie," came in a meek and muffled tone from the apron, "we'll go back with you."

"Can't we just set on the fence of the lot—it ain't so far?" pleaded Jennie in almost a wail. "I'm afraid Pete will cry from the smell if we go any closter. He's most doing it now."

"Yes, General, let the girls sit on the fence," pleaded Everett, with his eyes dancing, but a bit of mockery in his voice, "after all they are—girls, you know."

"Oh, well, yes, they can," answered Stonewall Jackson in a magnanimously disgusted tone of voice. "They always get girls when they don't want to do anything. Come on, Tobe'll be crying if we don't hurry. Billy, you help Jennie drag Pete, so he can go fast!"

But during the conference the disgusted toddler had been pondering the situation, and at this mention of his being dragged back to the scene of offense he had made a quick sally across the plank that spanned the spring branch and with masculine intuition as to the safe place in time of danger, he had plunged head foremost into Rose Mary's skirts, so that only his small fat back showed to the enemy.

"Please go on, Stonie, and leave him with me—he's just a baby," pleaded Rose Mary.

"All right," answered the General, "Tobe don't care about him; he'd just make us go slow," and thus dropping young Peter into the category of impedimenta, the General departed at top speed, surrounded, as he came, by the 

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