"There's that man who saved the team," gasped Dorothy. "Mercy!
Wherever does he come from? A man is worse than two herds of
sheep--in our scrape with Mrs. Pangborn!"

Just as mysteriously as he had appeared before, the man with the
Chesterfieldian walk, and the big slouch hat, turned into the road.
Where he had come from, nobody could imagine.

"He has followed us!" breathed Nita. "Oh, dear me!" and she pressed
her handkerchief to her eyes.

"If you cry we will tell him you are too ill to walk, and then, maybe
he'll offer to carry you," blurted out Edna. "If one insists on being
a baby, she must be babied."

This charge rather frightened Nita back to courage, or at least she
pretended to it, for she promptly quickened her pace, and even hid
away her handkerchief.

Tavia, too, saw the strange man as he emerged, seemingly, from
nowhere, for she started on a run, laughing uproariously at the herd
of sheep that trotted as she increased her pace, turned as she turned,
and, in fact, seemed to be at a regular game of "follow the leader."

The young man stood carefully posed in the path, just where a huge
stone afforded him a setting for his rather dusty boots.

"What a chap!" commented Edna. "Seems to me he has enough strikes and
poses to make a good cigar box picture."