"We can reach it with the hose and fill it up in no time," his cousin explained.
"It'll run out of the hole," pointing to the hole made by the broomstick when the concrete was soft.
"I don't want to leave him here all alone," screamed Dicky, overcome by a renewal of his former misgivings. Casting himself on the ground he hugged his treasure to his breast and waved his legs in the air.
"You can take him back again if you want to," Ethel Brown reminded him, "but you know he's always getting into trouble with the chickens now. He seems to run away every day."
As the memory of the latest encounter between Christopher and the chicks with Elisabeth's overthrow, flashed before him, Dicky howled again. There seemed to be no haven on earth for his favorite.
"I'll tell you what we'll do," suggested Dorothy soothingly. "Let's go down to the house. The laundry is finished, and we can put him in one of the tubs there until this pool is fixed to suit you."
"It'th dark in the laundry," objected Dicky again.
"Not in this laundry. You see," explained Dorothy, sitting down beside the sufferer and patting him gently, "the house is built on the side of a hill, so the laundry has full sized windows and is bright and cheerful though it's on a level with the cellar. I think Christopher will like it."
Dicky stood up, his face smeared with tears, but a new interest gleaming in his reddened eyes.
"Come on," urged Ethel Blue, tactfully; "let's all go and see if we can't make him comfortable."
"I'll pick up a piece of log for him as we go along," promised Roger, and he and Tom and James went off towards the woods to look for just the right thing.
"What a perfectly dandy cellar. Why, it's as bright as the upper part of the house!" exclaimed Margaret as the procession invaded the lower regions of the Lodge.
"Isn't it fine!" agreed Dorothy. "The workmen have cleared it all up, and, if this part were all, it might be lived in right off."
"The whitewashed walls make it look bright."
"And the large windows! I never saw such windows in a cellar."
"Mother says I may put little cheesecloth curtains in them."
"Curtains will look sweet the day after you take in the winter supply of coal," grinned Roger, who appeared with the other boys, carrying Christopher's bit of log.