Half-Past Seven Stories | Page 6

look mysterious and suspicious--very pleasantly suspicious.
"I'll bet that's for us," declared Marmaduke.
"You just bet it is!" said his brother.
So each day for almost a week, they lingered around the shop, after school was out. But the Toyman never appeared until long after five. He had his cornhusking to do, and he wanted to get all the fall jobs finished before cold weather.
One week went by, then another. It was very provoking, thought the boys, to have to wait so long for that secret.
Jehosophat did try once to find out about it. He stopped the Toyman as he was coming from the barn with a pail full of bubbly milk.
"Say, Toyman, what are those boards for?"
"What boards?" asked the Toyman--just as if he didn't know.
"Those boards you put in your workshop," both the boys answered together. It sounded like some chorus they had learned for Commencement.
"Ho ho!" laughed the Toyman, "ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies."
He was hopeless. He was forever making queer answers and queerer rhymes which Miss Prue Parsons the school teacher didn't at all approve. But Father said it didn't hurt the children as far as he could see--it just entertained them.
So the Toyman was answering:
_"Ask me no questions an' I'll tell you no lies; Gooseberries are sour but make very sweet pies."_
The boys had to be content with that information, but it was very hard waiting.
There came a day when it rained, and the Toyman couldn't work in the fields, or paint the house, or mend the leaks in the roof of the barn. Of course, he might have fixed Old Methusaleh's harness, which badly needed repairs, but he looked at the sky and said,--
"It looks like snow. I ought to get at that--"
Then he bit his lip and the secret was still safe.
Very mysteriously he unlocked the door of his workshop. And the boys peeked in.
"Where's your ticket, Sonny?" he asked, seeing their two heads in the doorway. That was his way, you see, making a game out of everything.
"We haven't any, but oh, Toyman, let us in, _plee-a-sse_."
"All right, but don't talk more than forty words to the minute, or I can't plane this straight," he said, working away at the boards.
They couldn't yet guess what IT was. And it took a good many hours from his work and chores for the Toyman to finish IT, whatever IT was. But after about a week they saw standing against the wall four boards about two feet long, curved like this:
[Illustration]
And four more cross-pieces of a very ordinary shape:
[Illustration]
And one cross-piece with handles:
[Illustration]
Then one very long one like this:
[Illustration]
The thing to do was to guess what they would make when put together.
Just then the Toyman arrived with three barrel hoops. And he worked away with his tools until the hoops were almost straight. Then he made little holes in them and nailed them with little nails, very neatly, on the four long curved pieces of wood. Then he fastened these curved pieces together by nailing the cross-pieces between. He fastened the other pair in the same way, and the affair began to look something like catamarans, those funny boats the geographies say folks use in Australasia.
[Illustration]
But when he nailed the big board on and attached the steering gear, it was easy to see what all the time the Toyman had been planning to make. And when he painted the runners yellow with a little blue edge running around them, and the seat bright red, with a white star on it, they decided it was the finest bobsled in the world.
And, oh yes, he had to paint the word "Scud" in blue letters, right near the star.
[Illustration]
Yes sir, there was no doubt about it, it was the finest bobsled in the world--the whole world, we mean.
And again the boys shouted, "Hooray!," together as in a chorus, not forgetting to add,--"And thank you, Toyman, heaps!"
Then they happened to think the bobsled was ready, but something else was missing--something very necessary, too.
"Now for the snow!" Jehosophat said.
"I can knock together a bobsled, sonny," the Toyman replied, "But I haven't any tools to make that."
So every night, when he said his prayers, Marmaduke added another sentence to "God bless Mamma an' Papa an' the Toyman an' Wienie an'" all the rest of his friends. Perhaps you can guess what it was. No? Well it sounded something like this:
"An' please, God, send us some snow,--a whole lot of it!"
Well, it came in about a week. On the twenty-third of November, to be exact.
It took only an hour to make the fields white, and only about three for the snow to pile deep enough to carry the new bobsled.
The Toyman looked at the sky, then at the ground, and then at his shop.
"Guess I'll knock off," he said. He