They came back with a basket. In the basket was a snoox and a gringo. And the snoox and the gringo took hammers, jacks, flanges, nuts, screws, bearings, ball bearings, axles, axle grease, ax handles, spits, spitters, spitballs and spitfires, and worked. “It’s a hot job,” said the snoox to the gringo. “I’ll say it’s a hot job,” said the gringo answering the snoox. “We’ll give this one the merry razoo,” said the snoox to the gringo, working overtime and double time. “Yes, we’ll put her to the cleaners and shoot her into high,” said the gringo, answering the snoox, working overtime and double time. They changed the steel to air, made an _air_ car out of the _steel_ car, put Hot Balloons and the two pigeons into the air car and _drove the air car across the air bridge_. And nowadays when people talk about it in the Rootabaga country, they say, “The snoox and the gringo drove the air car across the air bridge clean and cool as a whistle in the wind. As soon as the car got off the bridge and over into the Rootabaga country, the two pigeons changed in a flash. And Hot Balloons saw they were his two daughters, his two runaway girls, Dippy the Wisp and Slip Me Liz, standing and smiling at him and looking fresh and free as two fresh fish in a free river, fresh and free as two fresh bimbos in a bamboo tree.” He kissed them both, two long kisses, and while he was kissing them the snoox and the gringo worked double time and overtime and changed the _air_ car back into a _steel_ car. And Dippy the Wisp and Slip Me Liz rode in that car—starting with a snizz and a snoof till it began running smooth and even as a catfoot—showing their father, Hot Balloons, where the squirrels carry ladders and the wildcats ask riddles and the fish jump out of the rivers and speak to the frying pans, where the baboons take care of the babies and the black cats come and go in orange and gold stockings, where the birds wear rose and purple hats on Monday afternoons up in the skylights in the evening. And often on a Saturday night or a New Year Eve or a Christmas morning, Hot Balloons remembers back how things used to be, and he tells his two girls about the rag pickers and the rag handlers back among the people who sell slips, flips, flicks, and chicks, by the dozen, by the box, by the box car job lot, back and forth to each other. [Illustration] How Two Sweetheart Dippies Sat in the Moonlight on a Lumber Yard Fence and Heard About the Sooners and the Boomers Not so very far and not so very near the Village of Liver-and-Onions is a dippy little town where dippy people used to live. And it was long, long ago the sweetheart dippies stood in their windows and watched the dips of the star dippers in the dip of the sky. It was the dippies who took the running wild oleander and the cunning wild rambler rose and kept them so the running wild winters let them alone.