XXIVTHE UMBRELLA
Johnnie Greenwanted to go over the hill to play with a friend—a boy called “Red.”
“You may go,” his mother said, “but you must take an umbrella. We’re going to have rain.”
Now, Johnnie Green didn’t like to carry an umbrella.
“I don’t think it’s going to rain,” he grumbled. “I’ll ask Father if I need to take one.”
“Your father has gone to the village,” Mrs. Green told him. “Maybe you’d rather stay at home, anyhow.”
“Oh, no!” Johnnie exclaimed quickly. And snatching up his umbrella, he slipped out of the door.
“I’m not going to walk ’way over the hill—not if I have to carry this umbrella,” he muttered as soon as he was out of his mother’s hearing.
A few minutes later he was throwing his saddle on Mistah Mule. And then he mounted him.
Mistah Mule cocked his eye at the closed umbrella in Johnnie Green’s hand.
“What for this boy got that club?” he asked himself. “He better not hit me with it.”
Once in the road, Johnnie urged Mistah Mule into a canter. He noticed that dark clouds were fast gathering overhead. And white wisps of cloud were beginning to whisk over the top of Blue Mountain.
“Giddap! Giddap!” he cried to MistahMule. “We want to get to Red’s house before the storm breaks.”
They weren’t half way up the long hill when the wind began to whip the tree-tops and a driving rain swept across the valley, pelting them with great drops.
Johnnie Green fumbled with the strap of his umbrella. And then he raised it, spread, over his head.
All at once a cyclone seemed to strike him. Mistah Mule plunged and reared and bucked. Johnnie clung to the umbrella with one hand, to the pommel of the saddle with the other. The umbrella turned wrong side out at the very moment when the saddle-girth broke. And the next thing Johnnie Green knew, he found himself sitting in the middle of the road, in a puddle, holding the wrecked umbrella aloft.
Mistah Mule was standing a little distanceaway with his back to the storm, hunched up, and with his head drooping.
Johnnie didn’t care to mount him again. With the soft mud sucking at his feet with every step he took, he led Mistah Mule home.
“There was a cyclone for a few moments,” he told the family while he dried himself in the kitchen.
Farmer Green had come home. And when he heard all of Johnnie’s story he quickly guessed the truth of the matter. Mistah Mule liked umbrellas even less than Johnnie Green.