He blew and blew and blew; he set his lips tight together, as he had observed the little musician with the big horn set his, and blew and sputtered, and sputtered and blew, but nothing of the slightest importance happened in the orifice of the funnel. Still he blew. He began to be dizzy; his eyes watered; his expression became as horrible as a strangled person's. He but blew the more.
He stamped his feet and blew. He staggered to the wheelbarrow, sat, and blew--and yet the funnel uttered nothing; it seemed merely to breathe hard.
It would not sound like a horn, and, when Penrod finally gave up, he had to admit piteously that it did not look like a horn. No boy over nine could have pretended that it was a horn.
He tossed the thing upon the floor, and leaned back in the wheelbarrow, inert.
"Yay, Penrod!"
Sam Williams appeared in the doorway, and, behind Sam, Master Roderick Magsworth Bitts, Junior.
"Yay, there!"
Penrod made no response.
The two came in, and Sam picked up the poor contrivance Penrod had tossed upon the floor.
"What's this ole dingus?" Sam asked.
"Nothin'."
"Well, what's it for?"
"Nothin'," said Penrod. "It's a kind of a horn."
"What kind?"
"For music," said Penrod simply.
Master Bitts laughed loud and long; he was derisive. "Music!" he yipped. "I thought you meant a cow's horn! He says it's a music-horn, Sam? What you think o' that?"
Sam blew into the thing industriously.
"It won't work," he announced.
"Course it won't!" Roddy Bitts shouted. "You can't make it go without you got a REAL horn. I'm goin' to get me a real horn some day before long, and then you'll see me goin' up and down here playin' it like sixty! I'll--"
"'Some day before long!'" Sam mocked. "Yes, we will! Why'n't you get it to-day, if you're goin' to?"
"I would," said Roddy. "I'd go get the money from my father right now, only he wouldn't give it to me."
Sam whooped, and Penrod, in spite of his great depression, uttered a few jibing sounds.