Kit of Greenacre Farm

Kit was on lookout duty, and had been for the past hour and a half. The cupola room, with its six windows, commanded a panoramic view of the countryside, and from here she had done sentry duty over the huckleberry patch.

It lay to the northeast of the house, a great, rambling, rocky, ten acre lot that straggled unevenly from the wood road down to the river. To the casual onlooker, it seemed just a patch of underbrush. There were half-grown birches all over it, and now and then a little dwarf spruce tree or cluster of hazel bushes. But to the girls of Greenacres, that ten acre lot represented a treasure trove in the month of August when huckleberries and blueberries were ripe. Shad said knowing the proper time to pick huckleberries was just born in one, so the girls had guarded the old pasture from any marauding youngsters or wayside peddlers.

"You've got to keep a good eye out for them this year," Shad warned them. "Last year wasn't good for huckleberries, apples or nuts, but this is going to be a regular jubilee harvest. Them bushes up there are hanging so full that you can put up quarts and quarts and quarts of them and send huckleberry pies to the heathen all winter if you want to."

And he had likewise warned them that that particular berry patch had been famous throughout the countryside ever since the days when Greenacres had belonged to the Trowbridges. Several times when it had happened to be a good year for the huckleberry crop, raiders had swept down and culled the best of the harvest. Not from around the near-by villages had they come, but from the small towns, ten or fifteen miles away.

"Them mill boys and girls," Shad declared, "just think that the Lord grows things in the country for anybody to come along and pick. They don't pay no more attention to a 'No Trespassing' sign than they would to a woodchuck's tracks. The only thing to do is watch, and when you see 'em turn in through the bars off the main road, you come down and let me know, and telephone over for Hannibal Hicks to come and ketch 'em. Hannibal ain't doin' nothin' to earn his fifteen dollars a year as constable 'round here, and we ought to help him out if we can."

So to-day, it was Kit's turn to watch the huckleberry patch from the cupola room, and along towards three o'clock she beheld a trig-looking red-wheeled, black-bodied wagon, drawn unmistakably by a livery horse, pull up at the pasture bars, and its driver calmly and shamelessly hitch there. He took out of the wagon not a burlap bag, but a tan leather hand bag of generous size, and also something else that looked like a capacious box with a handle to it.

"Camouflage," said Kit to herself, scornfully. "He's going to fill them with our berries, and then make believe he's selling books."

Down-stairs she sped with the news. Doris was out at the barn negotiating peace terms with a half-grown calf that she had been trying to tame for days, and which still persisted in butting its head every time she came near it with friendly overtures. Jean and Helen had gone up to Norwich with Mrs. Robbins for the day, and her father was out in the apple orchard with Philemon Weaver, spraying the trees against the attacks of the gypsy moths. Leastwise, Philemon held to spraying, but Mr. Robbins was anxious to experiment with some of the newer methods advocated by the government.

All unconscious of Kit's intentions or Shad's eagerness to abet them, the two rambled off towards the upland orchards. Kit had started Shad after the trespasser, while she went back to telephone to Mr. Hicks. The very last thing she had said to Shad was to put the vandal in the corn-crib and stand guard over him until Mr. Hicks came.

"Don't you worry one bit, Miss Kit," the constable of Gilead Township assured her over the wire. "I'll be there in my car in less than twenty minutes. You folks ain't the only ones that's suffering this year from fruit thieves, and it's time we taught these high fliers from town that they can't light anywhere they like and pick what they like. I'll take him right down to the judge this afternoon."

Kit sat by the open window and fanned herself with a feeling of triumphant indignation. If Jean or Helen had been home, she knew perfectly well they would have been soft-hearted and lenient, but every berry on every bush was precious to Kit, and she felt that now was the appointed hour, as Cousin Roxy would have said.

Inside of a few minutes, Shad came back, perspiring and red faced, but filled with unholy glee. He dipped a tin bucket into the water pail.

"I've got him," he said, happily, "safe and sound in the corn-crib, and it's hotter than all get out in there. He can't escape unless he slips through a crack in the floor. I just caught him red handed as he was bending down right over the bushes, and what do you suppose he tried to tell me, Miss Kit? He said he was looking for caterpillars." Shad laughed riotously at the recollection. "Did you call up Han Hicks?"

Kit nodded, looking out at the corn-crib. The midsummer sun beat down upon it pitilessly, at the end of the lane behind the barn.

"Do you suppose he'll survive, Shad? I'll bet a cookie it's a hundred and six inside there."

"Do him good," retorted Shad. "Probably it's the only chance he's ever had to meditate on his misdoings. Don't you fret about him. He's just as husky as I be, and twice as hefty. It was all I could do to ketch a good holt on him."

"Oh, Shad," exclaimed Kit. "I didn't want you to touch him, you know."

"I didn't," Shad laughed. "I just gave him a bit of sound scripture reasoning, aided by fist persuasion when he was inclined to put up an argument. I'll stand guard over him until Han comes along, and takes him quietly off our hands. I reckon he didn't think we had any majesty of the law here in Gilead."

Kit looked after his retreating figure somewhat dubiously. It was one thing to act on the impulse of the moment and quite another to face the consequences. Now that the prisoner was safe in the corn-crib, she wondered somewhat uneasily just what her father would say when he found out what she had done to protect the berry patch. But just now he was safe in the upper orchard with old Mr. Weaver, deep in apple culture, and she thought she could get rid of the trespasser before he returned.

Mrs. Gorham was in the kitchen putting up peaches. Her voice came with droning, old-fashioned sweetness through the screen door.

"When I can read my title dear

To mansions in the skies,

I'll bid farewell to every fear,

And wipe my weeping eyes."

Kit slipped around the side drive behind the house out to the hill road. Mr. Hicks would have to come from Gilead Green in this direction, and here she sat on one of the high entrance posts, waiting and cogitating.

The woodbine that clambered over the two high, white posts was still green, but scrambling along the ground were wild blackberry runners just turning a rich brown crimson.

The minutes passed and still Mr. Hicks failed to appear. If Kit could have visualized his journey hither, she might have beheld him, lingering here and there along the country roads, stopping to tell the news to any neighbor who might be working out his road tax in the lull of the season between haying and harvest time. Beside him sat Elvira, his youngest, drinking in every word with tense appreciation of the novelty. It was the first chance Mr. Hicks had had to make an arrest during his term of office, and as a special test and reward of diligence, Elvira had been permitted to come along and behold the climax with her own eyes. But the twenty minutes stretched out into nearly an hour's time and more, and Kit's heart sank when she beheld her father strolling leisurely down the orchard path, just as Mr. Hicks hove in sight.

Mr. Weaver hobbled beside him, smiling contentedly.

"Well, I guess we've got 'em licked this time, Jerry," he chuckled. "If there's a bug or a moth that can stand that leetle dose of mine, I'll eat the whole apple crop myself."

"Still, I'll feel better satisfied when Howard gets here, and gives an expert opinion," Mr. Robbins rejoined. "He wrote he expected to be here to-day without fail."

"Well, of course you're entitled to your opinion, Jerry," Mr. Weaver replied doubtfully. "But I never did set any store at all by these here government chaps with their little satchels and tree doctor books. I'd just as soon walk up to an apple tree and hand it a blue pill or a shin plaster."

Kit slid hastily down from the post as Mr. Hicks' black and white horse turned in from the road.

"Hello," he called out, cheerily. "How be you, Jerry? Howdy, Philemon? Miss Kit here tells me you've been harboring a fruit thief, and you've caught him."

Kit's cheeks were bright red as she laid one hand on her father's shoulder.

"Shad's got him right over in the corn-crib, Mr. Hicks. I haven't told father yet, because it might worry him. It isn't anything at all, Dad," she added, hurriedly. "We girls have been keeping a watch on the berry patch, you know, and to-day it was my turn to stand guard up in the cupola. I just happened to see somebody over there after the berries, so I told Shad to go and get him, and I called up Mr. Hicks."

Mr. Robbins shook his head with a little smile.

"I'm afraid Kit has been overzealous, Hannibal," he said. "I don't know anything about this, but we'll go over to the corn-crib and find out what it's all about."

Kit and Evie secured a good point of vantage up on the porch while the others skirted around the garden over to the old corn-crib where Shad stood sentinel duty.

"My, I like your place over here," Evie exclaimed, wistfully. "You've got so many ornaments out-of-doors. Ma says she can't even grow a nasturtium on our place without the hens scratching it up."

Kit nodded, but could not answer. Already she had what Cynthy Allen called a "premonition" that all was not as it should be at the corn-crib. She saw Shad stealthily and cautiously put back the wide wooden bars that held the door, then Mr. Hicks, fully on the defensive with a stout hickory cane held in readiness for any unseemly onslaught on the part of the culprit, advanced into the corn-crib. Evie drew closer, her little freckled face full of curiosity.

"Ain't Pop brave?" she whispered, "and he never made but two arrests before in all his life. One was over at Miss Hornaby's when she wouldn't let Minnie and Myron go to school 'cause their shoes were all out on the ground, and the other time he got that French weaver over at Beacon Hill for selling cider."

Still Kit had no answer, for over at the corn-crib she beheld the strangest scene. Out stepped the prisoner as fearlessly and blithely as possible, spoke to her father, and the two of them instantly clasped hands, while Shad, Mr. Hicks and Philemon stared with all their might. The next the girls knew, the whole party came strolling back leisurely, and Kit could see the stranger was regaling her father with a humorous view of the whole affair. Shad tried to signal to her behind his back some mysterious warning, and even Mr. Hicks looked jocular.

Kit leaned both hands on the railing, and stared hard at the trespasser. He was a young man, dressed in a light gray suit with high sport boots. He was, as Mrs. Gorham expressed it later, "light complected" and tanned so deeply that his blonde, curly hair seemed even lighter. He lifted his hat to Kit, with one foot on the lower step, while Mr. Robbins called up:

"Mr. Howard, my dear, our fruit expert from Washington, whom I was expecting."

And Kit bowed, blushing furiously and wishing with all her heart she might have silenced Evie's audible and disappointed ejaculation:

"Didn't he hook huckleberries after all?"

* * *

"I was perfectly positive that if we went away and left you in charge for one single day, Kit, you would manage to get into some kind of misadventure," Jean said, reproachfully, that evening. "If you only wouldn't act on the impulse of the moment. Why on earth didn't you tell father, and ask his advice before you telephoned to Mr. Hicks?"

"That's a sensible thing for you to say," retorted Kit, hotly, "after you've all warned me not to worry Dad about anything. And I did not act upon the impulse of the moment," very haughtily. "I made certain logical deductions from certain facts. How was I to know he was hunting gypsy moths and other winged beasts when I saw him bending over bushes in our berry patch? Anyhow it would simplify matters if Dad would let us know when he expected illustrious visitors. Did you see old Hannibal's face and Evie's, too? They were so disappointed at not having a prisoner in tow to exhibit to the Gilead populace on the way over to the jail."

Mrs. Gorham glanced up over her spectacles at the circle of faces around the sitting-room table. The girls had volunteered to help her pick over berries for canning the following day. It was a sacrifice to make, too, with the midsummer evening calling to them in all its varied orchestral tones: Katydids and peep frogs, the swish of the wind through the big Norway pines on the terraces, and the scrape of Shad's old fiddle from the back porch. It was Friday evening, and Mr. and Mrs. Robbins had driven over to the Judge's to attend a community meeting, the latter being one of Cousin Roxy's innovations in Gilead.

"Land alive," she had been wont to say. "Here we are all living on the same hills and valleys and never meeting 'cept on Sundays when we have to, or now and again when there happens to be a funeral. I declare if I didn't drive about all the time behind Ella Lou, I'd never know how folks were getting on. So every two weeks the Judge and I are going to hold an old-time social, only we call it a community meeting so as to try to give it the new spirit. It's just as well for us to remember that we ain't all dead yet by a long shot, 'though I do think there's a whole lot that ain't got any more get up and get to them than Noah's old gray mule that had to be shoved off the Ark."

Mr. Robbins had invited the erstwhile prisoner to accompany them, but he had decided instead to keep on his way to the old Inn on the hill above the village, much to Jean and Helen's disappointment.

Helen had discovered that his first name was Stanley, which relieved her mind considerably.

"If it had been Abijah or Silas, I know I could never have forgiven him for getting in the berry patch," she said, "but there is something promising about Stanley. Seems as if he lit like Mercury just when there wasn't anything happening here at all."

"Wonder if I turned out that oil stove," Mrs. Gorham said thoughtfully. "Seems like I smell something. Shad," raising her voice, "do you get up and go out in that 'ell' room and see if I turned out that fire under the syrup. I smell smoke."

"Oh, Lord," groaned Shad, laying aside his cherished instrument. "You could smell ice if you half tried."

He got up lumberingly and sauntered out through the kitchen into the long lean-to addition, that was used as a summer kitchen now, and the moment he opened the door there poured out a thick volume of black smoke and flying soot. The old-fashioned oil stove had a way of letting its wicks "work up," as Shad said, if left too long to its own devices.

There was a spurt of flame from the woodwork behind the stove, and Shad slammed the door to, and ran for the water bucket.

It seemed incredible how fast the flames spread. Summoned by his outcry, the girls formed a bucket brigade from the well to the kitchen door, while Shad, his mouth bound around in a drenched Turkish towel, fought the blaze single handed.

Mrs. Gorham made straight for the telephone, calling up the Judge, and two or three of the nearest neighbors for help. The Peckham boys from the sawmill were the first to respond, and five minutes later Hiram was on the spot, having seen the rising smoke and flare in the sky from Maple Lawn.

"You'll never save the place," old Mr. Peckham told them flatly. "The well's low and everything is dry as tinder. Better start carrying things out, girls, because the best we men-folks can do is to keep the roofs wet down and try to save the barn."

While the fire was confined to the "ell" kitchen, the two older Peckham boys set to work up-stairs, under Jean's direction. Kit had made for her father's room the first thing. When Jean opened the door she found her piling the contents of the desk and chiffonier drawers helter-skelter into blankets.

"It's all right, Jean," she called. "I'm not missing a thing. You tie the corners up and have the boys carry these down-stairs and bring back the clothes-basket and a couple of tubs for the books. Tell Helen to take the canaries out."

"Doris has them, and Gladsome, too," answered Jean. "And Mrs. Gorham is getting all of the preserves out of the cellar, and Mr. Peckham says he's sure they'll save the piano and most of the best furniture, but, oh, Kit, just think of how father and mother will feel when they see the flames in the sky, and know it's Greenacres burning."

"You'd better start in at mother's room and stop cogitating, or we'll be sliding down a lightning rod to get out of here."

Nobody quite noticed Helen in the excitement, but later when all was over, it was found that she had rescued all the treasures possible, the pictures and bric-à-brac, the sofa pillows and all the linen and family silver that had been packed away in the bottom of the sideboard.

As the rising glow of the flames lighted up the sky help began to arrive from all quarters. Mrs. Gorham's thoughtfulness in telephoning immediately brought the Judge first, with all of the neighbors that had been present at the community meeting. Cousin Roxy was bareheaded, little curly wisps of hair fluttering around her face.

"I made your father stay up at our place," she told the girls. "You'll all probably have to come back with me anyhow and excitement isn't good for him. Besides, he wouldn't be a bit of good around here. Seems like they're getting the fire under pretty good control. I don't believe all the house will go. It was fearful old anyway, and it needed to be rebuilt if you ever expect your great-grandchildren to live here."

Kit noticed an entirely new and unsuspected trait in Cousin Roxy on this night of excitement. It was the only time when she had not seen her take command of the situation. But to-night she helped Mrs. Gorham pack all the necessary household supplies into the back of the wagon for Shad to drive up to Maple Lawn. As soon as she had seen the extent of the damage she had said immediately that the robin's nest must be moved up the hill to her own old home, where she had lived before her marriage to Judge Ellis.

"It won't take but a couple of days to put it into shape for you, and Hiram's right up there to look after things. You'll be back here before snow flies, with a few modern improvements put in, and all of you the better for the change. Helen, go bring the family treasures from under that pine tree, and put them in the back of our car."

"You know, Cousin Roxy," Kit exclaimed, "I thought the minute you showed up down here to-night you'd be the chief of the fire department."

Cousin Roxy laughed heartily.

"Did you, child? Well, I've always held that there are times and seasons when you ought to let the men-folks alone. After you've lived a lifetime in these parts, you'll know that every boy born and bred around here is taught how to fight fire from the time he can tote a water bucket. Did you save all the chickens, Shad?"

"Ain't lost even a guinea hen!" Shad assured her. "The barn ain't touched, and so I'm going to sleep over the harness room and watch out for the stock."

It was always a secret joy to the girls to hear the way Shad would roll out about the Greenacre "stock."

"Just as if," Jean said, "we had all the cattle upon a thousand hills and racers and thoroughbreds into the bargain, instead of Bonnibel and Lady Bountiful, with Princess and the hens. I think Helen put him up to it. She always thinks in royal terms of affluence."

* * *

The morning after the fire found the family at breakfast over with the Judge's family. It was impossible as yet for the girls to feel the full reaction over their loss. As the Judge remarked, youth responds to change and variety quicker than any new interest, and they were already planning a wonderful reconstruction period. Kit and Billy rode down on horseback to look at the ruins, and came back with an encouraging report. The back of the house was badly damaged, but the main building stood intact, though the charred clapboards and wide vacant windows looked desolate enough.

"Thank goodness the wind was from the south, and blew the flames away from the pines," said Kit, dropping into her chair, hungrily. "Doesn't it seem good to get some of Cousin Roxy's huckleberry pancakes again, girls? Oh yes, we met my prisoner-I should say, my erstwhile prisoner-on the road. He was tapping chestnut trees over on Peck's Hill like a woodpecker. You needn't laugh, Doris, 'cause Billie saw him too, didn't you, Bill? And he's got a sweet forgiving nature. He doffed his hat to me and I smiled back just as though I'd never caught him in our berry patch, and had Shad lock him up in the corn-crib."

"Was he heading this way?" the Judge asked. "I want him to look at my peach trees and tell me what in tunket ails them."

"Why, Judge, I'm surprised at you, and before the children, too." Cousin Roxy's eyes twinkled with mirth at having caught the Judge in a lapse.

"I only said tunket, Roxy," he began, but Cousin Roxy cut him short.

"Tunket's been good Connecticut for Tophet ever since I was knee high to a toadstool, and we won't say anything more about that. Jerry will be glad to go up with you to the peach orchard, and you can take the youngsters with you. I want Jean and Kit to drive over with us and help fix Maple Lawn."

But before a week was out, all of the carefully laid plans for housing the "robins" before snow fell were knocked higher than a kite. Kit said that one of the most delightful things about country life, anyway, was its uncertainty. You went ahead and laid a lot of plans on the lap of the Norns, and then the old ladies stood up and scattered everything helter-skelter. The beauty of it was, though, that they usually turned around and handed you unexpected gifts so much better than anything you had hoped for, that you were left without a chance for argument.

The family had taken up its new quarters at Maple Lawn, and two of the local carpenters, Mr. Peleg Weaver, Philemon's brother, and Mr. Delaplaine, had been persuaded to devote a portion of their valuable time to rehabilitating Greenacre Farm. It took tact and persuasion to induce the aforesaid gentlemen to desert their favorite chairs on the little stoop in front of Byers' Grocery Store, and approach anything resembling daily toil. There had been a Squire in the Weaver family three generations back, and Peleg held firmly to established precedent. He might be landed gentry, but he was no tiller of the soil, and he secretly looked down on his elder brother for personally cultivating the family acres.

Mr. Delaplaine was likewise addicted to reverie and historic retrospect. Nothing delighted Billie and Kit so much as to ride down to the store and get a chance to converse with both of the old men on local history and family "trees." Mr. Delaplaine's mail, which consisted mostly of catalogues, came addressed to N.B. Delaplaine, Esq., and even the little French Canadian kiddies tumbling around the gardens of the mill houses down in Nantic knew what that N.B. stood for, but to Gilead he was just "Bony" Delaplaine.

Every day that first week found the girls down at the Farm prying around the ruins for any lost treasures. Stanley Howard struck up a friendship with both the Judge and Mr. Bobbins, and usually drove by on his way from the village. He would stop and chat for a few moments with them, but Kit was elusive. Vaguely, she felt that the proper thing for her to do was to offer an apology, for even considering him an unlawful trespasser. When Stanley would drive away, Jean would laugh at her teasingly.

"Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud, sister mine? He seems a very sightly young man, even if he does 'chase caterpillars for a living.' I never did see any one except you, Kit, who hated to acknowledge herself in the wrong. The rest of us all have the most peaceful, forgiving sort of dispositions, but you can be a regular porcupine when you want to be."

"It could come from Uncle Cassius," retorted Kit. "Did you hear them all talking about him over at Elmwood while we were there? Let's sit here under the pines a minute until the mailman goes by. I'm awfully tired poking over cinders. Cousin Roxy said he was the only notable in our family. Dean Cassius Cato Peabody. We ought to tell 'Bony' that."

"Don't you call him 'Bony' so he'll hear you," whispered Jean. "It would hurt his feelings." She glanced back over her shoulder to where Mr. Delaplaine worked, taking off the outer layer of charred clapboards from the front of the house.

"Still it is nice to own a dean, almost as good as a squire," repeated Kit, placidly. "There were only seven original ones here in Gilead; and his grandfather was one of those. Let's see, Jean, he would have been our great-great-great-grandfather, wouldn't he? Great-Uncle Cassius is named for him, Cassius Cato Peabody. Just think of him, Jean, with a name like that when he was a little boy, in a braided jacket and those funny high waisted breeches you see in the little painted woodcuts in Cousin Roxy's childhood books."

"I didn't pay much attention to what they were saying about him," said Jean, dreamily. "Is he still alive?"

"He is, but I guess he might as well be dead as far as the rest of the family is concerned. Cousin Roxy said he'd never married, and he lived with his old maiden lady sister out west somewhere. Not the real west, either; I mean the interesting west like Saskatchewan and Saskatoon and-and California; you know what I mean, Jean?"

"I didn't even hear where they lived. I'm afraid I wasn't interested. Aren't you glad the fire didn't bum the cupola? I almost wish they could leave the house that lovely weathered brown tone, instead of painting it white with green blinds again. Dad would like it that way, too. I suppose everybody would say it was flying in the face of tradition, after the Trowbridge place has been white two hundred years."

"There comes the mail," called Jean, starting up and running down the drive like a young deer, as the little cart hove in sight. The carrier waved a newspaper and letter at them.

"Nothin' for you girls, to-day, only a letter for your pa, and weekly newspaper for Hiram. I'll leave it up at the old place as I go by." He added as a happy afterthought to relieve any possible anxiety on their part, "It's from Delphi, Mich."

Kit stood transfixed with wonder, as he passed on up the hill.

"Jean," she said, slowly, "there's something awfully queer about me. I heard Cousin Roxy say once, I was born with a veil, and ought to be able to prognosticate. That letter was from Uncle Cassius Cato Peabody."

"Well, what if it is?" asked Jean, shaking the needles from her serge skirt as she rose leisurely.

Kit drew on her freshman knowledge of ancient history, and quoted:

"Last night the eagles circled over Rome,

And C?sar's destiny--"

Jean laughed and pointed to a line of crows rising leisurely from a clump of pine woods.

"What does it mean when the crows circle over Gilead?"

Kit jammed her velvet "tam" down over one ear adventurously, and started towards the gateway, finishing the quotation as she went:

"-crowned him thrice king!"

* * *