called the boys. "Stop the runaway!" and
instantly a half-dozen other boys appeared, and all started in pursuit.

But Frisky knew how to run, besides she had the advantage of a good
start, and now she just dashed along as if the affair was the biggest
joke of her life.

"The river! The river!" called the boys

"She'll jump in!" and indeed the pretty Meadow Brook, or river, that
ran along some feet lower than the Bobbseys' house, on the other side
of the highway, was now dangerously near the runaway calf.

There was a heavy thicket a few feet further up, and as the boys
squeezed in and out of the bushes Frisky plunged into this piece of
wood.

"Oh, she's gone now, sure!" called Harry "Listen!"

Sure enough there was a splash!

Frisky must be in the river!

It took some time to reach the spot where the fall might have sounded
from, and the boys made their way heavy-hearted, for all loved the
pretty little Frisky.

"There's footprints!" Bert discovered emerging from the thick bush.

"And they end here!" Harry finished, indicating the very brink of the
river.

"She's gone!"

"But how could she drown so quickly?" Bert asked.

"Guess that's the channel," Tom Mason, one of the neighbors' boys,
answered.

"Listen! Thought I heard something in the bushes!" Bert whispered.

But no welcome sound came to tell that poor Frisky was hiding in the
brushwood. With heavy hearts the boys turned away. They didn't even
feel like talking, somehow. They had counted on bringing the calf back
in triumph.

When Flossie and Freddie saw them coming back without Frisky they just
had to cry and no one could stop them.

"I tried to be a fireman!" blubbered Freddie. "I didn't care if the
rope hurted my hands either!"

"If only I didn't go in to see the chickens nests," Flossie whimpered,
"I could have helped Freddie!"

"Never you mind, little 'uns," Dinah told them. "Dinah go and fetch dat
Frisky back to-morrer. See if she don't. You jest don't cry no more,
but eat you supper and take a good sleep, 'cause we're goin' to have a
picnic to-morrer you knows, doesn't youse?"

The others tried to comfort the little ones too, and Uncle Daniel said
he knew where he could buy another calf just like Frisky, so after a
little while Freddie felt better and even laughed when Martha made the
white cat Fluffy and Snoop play ball in the big long kitchen.

"I'm goin' to pray Frisky will come back," Nan told her little brother
when she ki