looked at them and began to realize

His mother made one of the funniest faces he had ever seen, looking at his father all bewildered and surprised and holding in her laughter, and his father laughed out loud but Aunt Kate didn’t wake up. “Just like Catherine,” his mother whispered, laughing, and they all looked at Catherine, who was staring out at the mountains and looking very heavy and earnest; and they laughed and Catherine looked at them and began to realize they were laughing at her, and that made her face get red and that made them laugh some more, and even Rufus joined in, and they only stopped when Catherine began to stick out her lower lip and her mother said, “Mercy, child, you’ve got to learn to take a joke.” But her father said, “Doesn’t anybody like to be laughed at,” and took her on his lap, and she pulled her lip in and looked out the window again. Now they could even see the separate trees all over the sides of the mountains like rice, all shades of green and some almost black, and before much longer they were climbing more slowly past the feathery tops of trees and the high shoulders of the mountains and the great deep scoops were turning past them and beneath them as if they were very slowly and seriously dancing in sunlight and in cloud and in shadows almost of night, and now and then they could see a tiny cabin and a corn patch far off on the side of a mountain, and twice they even saw a tinier mule and a man with it, one of the men waved; and high above them in the changing sunlight, slowest of all, the tops of the mountains twisted and changed places. And after quite a while his father said he reckoned they better start getting their stuff together, and before much longer they got off. That night at supper when Rufus asked for more cheese Uncle Ted said, “Whistle to it and it’ll jump off the table into your lap.” “Ted!” his mother said. But Rufus was delighted. He did not know very well how to whistle yet, but he did his best, watching the cheese very carefully: it didn’t jump of the table into his lap; it didn’t even move. “Try some more,” Uncle Ted said. “Try harder.” “Ted!” his mother said.