"Nancy!" ejaculated Uncle Cradd with stern amazement.

"Can't do a thing with her when she looks like that, Cradd," said father, as he comfortably lighted a cigar and drew the small leather-covered book towards him with hungry fingers.

"Now, Ann," began Matthew, in the soothing tone of voice he had seen fail on me many times, "you don't understand entirely, and your situation is pretty desperate in—"

"I do, I do understand that when I refuse this offer I am assuming enormous obligations, Matthew Berry," I answered, with my head in the air and absolute courage in my heart.

"I ask you to bear witness, Matthew, to what my answer to the demand of my country would have been if I alone could have answered, but Nancy is within her rights, and I protect the rights of a woman before those of any man," said Uncle Cradd, and there was not a trace of relief in his fine old face that he was to be saved from a parting with the land that had been the love of his life, but one of affectionate regard and admiration for me. "Also say to the secretary of agriculture that a Craddock woman is as good as her word, and that the Harpeth Valley can be depended upon to lead the United States in the production of eggs in—when shall I promise, Nancy?"

"About—about a year," I answered, searching in my mind for some data from the huge red book as to when wealth from the hen could be expected to roll in in response to the "good management" I felt even then capable of displaying. Even now I can't blame myself for over-confidence when I think of the two white pearls in my hat on the table beside father's book.

"Better make it two," advised Matthew cautiously, but with a gleam of enthusiasm as he also glanced at the eggs. That gleam was what earned my forgiveness for his daring to come upon me with such a mission.

"Say eighteen months. That will be the end of the second season," I answered with decision. "And it is about time for me to give the last feeding of my hostages to the United States and Mr. Evan Baldwin. You'll excuse me, Matthew?" I asked politely, but cruelly, for I knew he intended to follow me immediately.

"Now here is your line of dispute, Cradd, just as I said," exclaimed father, who had opened his leather treasure and been hunting through its pages even before my heroics had completely exploded. And before Matthew and I had left the room, they were off on a bat with some favorite Ancient.



CHAPTER V

"Of course, Ann, you do realize just what you are doing?" asked Matthew of me, as we walked on the moss-green flagstones back to the barn, and his voice was so sweet and gentle with solicitude that I felt I must answer him seriously and take him into my confidence. Affection is a note that one must always make payment on.

"Yes, Matt, I do realize that those two are in a way children, for whose maintenance I have made myself responsible, and my mind is scared to death, but my heart is beating so high with courage that I can hardly stand it."

"Oh, come with me, Ann, and let me—" Matthew wooed.

"Matt," I answered gravely, "I haven't been here twenty-four hours yet, but when the thought of having it all taken away came to me, something in me rose and made me rage, rage, as I did in the house. I don't know what it is, but there is something in this low old farm-house, this tumble-down old barn, that leafless old garden with its crumbling brick walks, and these neglected, worn-out old acres, which seems to—to feed me and which I know I would perish without. Oh, please understand and—and help me a little like you did this morning," I ended with a broken plea, as I stretched out my hand to him just as I entered the door of my barn—castle of dreams for the future.

"Dear Lord, the pluck of women!" Matthew exclaimed reverently, down in his throat. "I'll be here, Ann, whenever you want me, and if you say that chickens must fill my future life, then chickens it shall be," he added, rising to the surface of the question again.

"Oh, Matt, you are a darling, and I—" I was exclaiming when a soft voice from out of the shadows of the barn interrupted me and an apple-blossom in the shape of a girl drifted into the late afternoon sunlight from the direction of the feed-room.

"I'm Polly Beesley, and mother sent these eggs to scramble with the ones you got this morning for supper," she said in a low voice that was positively fragrant with sweetness. Two huge plaits of corn-silk hair fell over her shoulders, and her eyes were as shy and blue as violets were before they became a large commercial product. Her gingham dress was cut with decorum just below her shoe-tops and, taking into consideration the prevailing mode, its length, fullness, and ruffles made the slim young thing look like a picture from the same review from which I had cut my smocks. However, I am sure that if she had been at the between six and eighteen age year before last, when about two and a half yards of gingham would have been modish for her costume, she would still have been attired in the voluminous ruffles.

"Holy smokes," I thought I heard Matthew gurgle, and I felt him start at the apparition, though the young thing never so much as glanced in his direction as she tendered me a quaint little basket in which lay half a dozen eggs, real homely brown eggs and not pearl treasures.

"Oh, thank you, Polly dear," I answered with enthusiasm, and in obedience to some urge resulting from the generations ahead of Polly and my incarnation in the atmosphere of Riverfield, my lips met the rosy ones that were held up to me. I felt sorry for Matthew, and I couldn't restrain a glance of mischief at him that crossed his that were fixed on the yellow braids.

"I didn't believe it of this day and generation," I heard him mutter as I presented him to Polly, who answered that she was "pleased to make his acquaintance," in a voice in which terror belied the sentiment expressed.

In her eyes traces of that same terror remained until suddenly the Golden Bird stepped proudly out of the bushes with the Ladies Bird, clucking and scratching along behind him. He had led the family out into the pasture and was now wisely returning them to the barn before the setting of the sun. I thought I had never seen him look so handsome, and no wonder his conquest was immediate.

"Oh, how beautiful," exclaimed Polly, while all restraint left her young face and body as she fell on her knees before the Sultan. "Chick, chick, chick," she wooed, in the words that Pan had used to command, and with a delight equal to hers in the introduction, the Bird came toward her. "Oh, please, sir, Mr.—Mr. Berry, get me some corn quick—quick! I want to squeeze him once," she demanded of Matthew, confident where she had before been fearful. His response was long-limbed and enthusiastic, so that in a few seconds Mr. G. Bird stood pecking grains from her hand. The spectacle was so lovely that I was not at all troubled by twinges of jealousy, but enjoyed it, for even at that early moment I think I felt a mercenary interest in seeing the friendship between the Golden Bird and the Apple-Blossom sealed. In her I psychologically scented an ally, and I enjoyed the hug bestowed upon him fully as much or even more than he did. It was a lovely picture that the kiddie made as she knelt at our feet with the white fluff balls and wings whirring and clucking around her.

"Yes; let's go into the chicken business, Ann," said Matthew, as his eyes danced with artistic pleasure. "You love 'em, don't you, Miss—Miss Corn-tassel?" he asked, with teasing delight in his voice as well as in his eyes.

"Yes sir," she answered as she looked up at him merrily, all fear of him gone.

"Say, what do you think of going into the business with your Uncle Matthew if Ann refuses to sell a half interest in hers to me?" he asked of her in his jolly booming voice, with a smile many inches wide across his face. "I'll put up the capital, you put up the work, and we'll take all the prizes away from Ann."

"I don't want to take the prizes from Miss Ann. I'd rather have Reds so we could both get ribbons," she answered as she dimpled up at me as affectionately as if she had tagged at my gingham skirts at our sixth and second years.

"Reds it shall be, Corn-tassel, and I'll be back with them as soon as an advertisement in the daily papers can find them for me. I'll start the search right now," said Matthew, teasing the kiddie as if he had known her all his life, but with an expression turning to the genuine poultry business enthusiasm. "You and Ann come on down to the gate with me in the car and we'll talk—"

But just here an interruption occurred in the way of a hoarse squawk coming from around the corner of the house. Hastily my eye called the roll of the Ladies of Leghorn and found them all present just as the tall young farmer whose ears had cooled down the day before over at Riverfield enough to let him admire the Golden Bird and family appeared around from behind the huge lilac at the corner of the house. He was attired as yesterday in the beautiful dull-blue overall and jacket; his hair was the color of Polly's and shocked from under the edges of a floppy gray hat, and in his arms he carried a large hen the identical color of Pan's head.

"Howdy, Miss Nancy," he said in a voice as shy as Polly's, and his eyes were also as blue and shy as hers. He looked right through Matthew until I introduced them, then he shifted the hen and shook hands with Polly's "Pleased to make your acquaintance" greeting.

"Glad to meet you, Mr. Beesley," said Matthew, exerting more charm of manner than I had ever seen him use before. "My, but that is a gorgeous bird you have!"

"She's a right good hen, but she's a mongrel. There isn't a single thoroughbred Rhode Island Red hereabouts. I aim to get a setting of pure eggs for Polly this spring if I sell my hawgs as good as Mr. Adam perdicks I will. I brought her as a present to you, Miss Nancy, 'cause she's been a-brooding about two days, and if you get together a setting of eggs the last of next week she'll hatch 'em all. She carried three broods last year."

"Oh, Mr. Beesley, how lovely of you," I exclaimed, as I reached out my arms for the gorgeous old red ally. "I like her better than any present I ever had in all my life!" This I said before the face of Matthew Berry, with a complete loss of memory of all of the wonderful things he had been giving me from my debut bouquet of white orchids and violets to the tiny scarab from the robe of an Egyptian princess that I wore in the clasp of my platinum wrist-watch.

"Well, I should say!" Matthew exclaimed, with not a thought of the comparison in his generous mind. "Did you know that your sister, Miss Polly, and I are going into the Rhode Island Red business together? We were just deciding the details as you came around the house. What do you say to coming in? How many shall I buy? Say, about fifty hens and half a dozen cocks? Let's start big while we are about it. If Ann is going to make three thousand dollars a year off one rooster and ten hens, we can make fifteen off of five times as many."

"Yes, and we can bust the business all to pieces with too much stock," answered the brother Corn-tassel. "Miss Nancy has got real horse-sense starting small, and chicken-sense too."

"I stand corrected," answered Matthew. "I see that a flyer cannot be taken in chickens any higher than a hen can fly. I'm growing heady over this business and must go back to town to set the wheels in motion. All of you ride down to the gate with me and find out what the word jolt means."

Then after housing the Bird family in the feed-room with their guest, all happily at scratch in the hay for the wheat and corn thrown to them by the Corn-tassels while Matthew and I went in to bid the paternal twins good-by, we all rode merrily and joltily down the long avenue under the old elms to the big gate at the square in Riverfield. In front of the post-office-bank-grocery emporium we deposited the Corn-tassels, introduced Matthew to Aunt Mary and Uncle Silas, with the most cordial results on both sides, and then turned in the car out the Riverfield ribbon instead of in.

"Just a spin will do you good, sweet thing," said Matthew, as I settled down close enough to his shoulder to talk and not interrupt the powerful engine. "I want you to myself for a small moment away from your live stock, human and inhuman."

"Oh, Matt, there is nobody just like you and you have made this day—possible," I said as I snuggled down into the soft cushions.

"Honestly, Ann, do you mean positively that you don't want me—now?" he asked me as he sent the car whirling into the sun setting over Old Harpeth.

"Not—now," I answered bravely, though I nestled a little closer to him. He seemed so good and strong and—certain.

"All right then, I'll take the next best and I'll come in to your farm circle as partner or competitor or any old thing that keeps me in your aura. I'll grow chickens with the Corn-tassels or—here we turn back for I want to get out again over that bit of mountain-path that leads to your citadel before twilight."

"Put me out at the gate, Matt. I want to walk up," I said, and held to it against his protest. I finally made him see that I really was not equal to another "rocking" over the road, and I stood and watched him drive the huge car away from me down the Riverfield ribbon.

"I'm afraid I love him and just don't know it," I said to myself, as I stood at the big gate and watched him going away from me into life as I had known it since birth until twenty-four hours past. And from that vision of my past I turned in the sunset light of the present and began to walk slowly up the long avenue into my future. "I've never known anything but dancing and motoring and being happy, and how could that teach any woman what love is?" I queried as I stopped and picked up a small yellow flower out of a nest of green leaves that some sort of ancestral influence must have introduced to me as dandelion, for I had never really met one before. I felt a pale reflection of the glow I had experienced when I took the two warm pearls in my hands in the morning.

Then suddenly something happened that thrilled me first with interest and then with—I don't know what to call it, but it was not fear. A fierce little wind, that was earthy and sweet, but strong, ruffled across my path and up into the tops of the elms, and with a bit of fury tore down an old bird's-nest and flung it at my feet. It was soft and downy with bits of fur and hair and wool inside, but it was all rent in two.

"I wonder if I can hold my Elmnest steady on the limb when—" I was saying to myself unsteadily, with a mist in my eyes for the small wrecked home, when from somewhere over my left shoulder there came Pan's reedy call, and it ended with the two Delilah notes that I had thought I heard in the early morning. It was with no will of my own that I answered with that coo which I had heard Mr. G. Bird singing on the stage of the Metropolitan in my dawn dream. Also I crashed rapidly through the bushes in the direction of the call that this time came imperatively and without the coo.

"To your left and then straight toward the oak-tree," came human words from Pan in quick command and direction. "Hurry!"

With a last struggle with the briars I broke out into a small open space under the spreading branches of the old oak and upon a scene of tragedy, that is, it was almost tragedy, for the poor old sheep was lying flat with pathetic inertia while Adam stood over her with something in his arms.

"It's the fine Southdown ewe I persuaded Rufus to trade for one of the precious hogs," he said, with not so much as a word of greeting or interest personal to me in his voice or glance, but with such wonderful tenderness that I came close to him because I couldn't resist it. "She dropped twin lambs last night and she is down with exhaustion. They are getting cold, and I want to take her right up to the barn where I can bed her on hay and get something hot into all three. Can you cuddle the lambs and carry them while I shoulder her?" As he spoke he held out his armful to me without wounding me by waiting for my consent.

"Oh, the poor, cold babies!" I exclaimed, as I lifted the skirt of my long, fashionable, heavy linen smock and wrapped them in it and my arms, close against my warm solar plexus, which glowed at their soft huddling. One tiny thing reached out a little red tongue and feebly licked my bare wrist, and I returned the caress of introduction with a kiss on its little snowy, woolly head.

"You've the lovesome hand with the beasties," said Pan as he smiled down on the lambs and me.



"I like 'em because they make me sorter grow inside some place, I don't know exactly where," I answered as I adjusted my woolly burden for what I knew would seem a long march. "I'll get 'em to the barn all right," I assured their first friend, who was now bending over the poor mother. "This is what I took Russian ballet dancing and played golf for, only I didn't know it."

"You'd have executed more Baskt twists and done more holes a day if you had known," said Adam, with beautiful unbounded faith in me, as he braced his legs far apart and lifted the limp mother sheep up across his back and shoulder. It seemed positively weird to be standing there acting a scene out of Genesis and mentioning Baskt, and I was about to say so when Pan started on ahead through the bushes and commanded me briefly to: "Come on!"

At his heels I toiled along with the sheep babies hugged close to my breast until at last we deposited all three on a bed of fragrant hay in a corner of the barn.

"What'll I feed 'em?" I questioned anxiously. "There isn't a bit of any kind of food on this place but the ribs of a hog and a muffin and a cup of coffee."

"We'll give her a quart of hot water with a few drops of this heart stimulant I have in my pocket, and she'll do the rest for the family as soon as she warms up. She's got plenty of milk and needs to have it drawn badly. There you are—go to it, youngsters. She is revived by just being out of the wind and in the warmth, and I don't believe she needs any medicine. She wouldn't let them to her udder if she wasn't all right. Now we can leave them alone for a time, and I'll give her a warm mash in a little while." As he spoke Adam calmly walked away from the interesting small family, which was just beginning a repast with great vigor, and paused at the feed-room door. With more pride than I had ever felt when entering a ball-room with a Voudaine gown upon me and a bunch of orchids, I followed and stood at his side.

"Well, how do you do, sweeties, and where did you get this model hen-house? Trap nests! I wouldn't have believed it of you!" said Adam to the Leghorn family and me inclusive.

"I didn't do it all," I faltered as I experienced a terrific temptation to lie silently and claim all of the affectionate praise that was beaming from Pan's eyes upon all of us, but I fought and conquered it with nobility. "Matthew Berry came out and did about—no, a little more than half of it. But I did all I could," I added, with a pathetic appeal for his approbation.

"Well, half of the job is more than the world could expect of the beautiful Ann Craddock, who sits in the front of Gale Beacon's box at the Metropolitan," answered Pan, with a little flute of laughter in his voice that matched the crimson crests which stood more rampant than ever across the tips of his ears.

"Why, where—who are you and—" I asked in astonishment as I followed him into the last of the sunset glow coming across the front of the barn.



CHAPTER VI

"I'm just Adam and I go many places," he answered with more of the intoxicating crooning laughter.

"Rufus says that red-headed Peckerwoods go to the devil on Fridays," I retorted to the raillery of the Pan laugh.

"It was Friday and she didn't sing Delilah to my notion. Did she to yours?" he asked, this time with a smile that was even more interesting than the laugh. "Come over and sit with me by the spring-house and let's discuss grand opera while I eat my supper and wait until I think it is safe to give the ewe some mash.

"I will if you'll invite me to the supper; I can't face another swine and muffin meal," I answered as I followed him down a path that led west from the barn-door.

"I've got two apples and a double handful of black walnut kernels. The drinks from the spring are on you," he answered as he led me down through a thicket of slim trees that were sending out a queer fragrance to a huge old stone spring-house from which gushed a stream of water. "Just these two spring days are bringing out the locust buds almost before time. Smell 'em!" he said as he looked up into the tops of the slim trees, which were showing a pink-green tinge of color in the red sunset rays.

"Oh," I said softly as I clasped my hands to my breast and breathed in deep, "I'm glad, glad I didn't have to let them sell it. I love it. I love it!"

"Sell it?" asked Adam as he brushed a rug of dry leaves from under the bushes upon one of the huge slabs of rock before the door of the spring-house for me to sit on, and took two apples from his pocket.

"Yes, and I'll work both my fingers and toes to the bone before I'll give it up," I answered as I crouched down beside him on the leaves and began to munch at the apple, which he had polished on the sleeve of his soft, gray, flannel shirt before he handed it to me.

While we dined on the two red apples, the tangy nuts, and a few hard crackers that, I think, were dog-biscuits, I told him all about it, up to my defiance and assumption of the management of Elmnest in the library after dinner.

"I can keep us from starving until I learn chickens, can't I?" I asked after the recital, and I crouched a little closer to him on the rock, for black shadows were coming in between the trees and into my consciousness, and all the pink moonlight had faded as a rosy dream, leaving the world about us silver gray.

"I wonder just how much genuine land passion there is in the hearts of women?" said Adam, softly answering my question with another. "The duration of race life depends upon it really."

"I don't know what you are talking about, but I understand you," I answered him hotly. "Also I know that I love that old sheep more than you do, and I'm going to get in line with my egg-basket when the United States begins mustering in forces to fight, no matter what it is to be. I wish I could say it like I feel it to that Mr. Secretary Evan Baldwin, who forgets that women are the natural—the nutritive sex."

"I wish you could," said kind Adam, with one of Pan's railing laughs.

"Don't laugh at me—I'm getting born all over, and it is hard," I said with a sob in my throat.

"Forgive me! I'm not really laughing—it's just a form—form of the Peckerwood's nature-worship," he answered as he took my hand in his warm one for a second. "Let's go finish up with old sheep mother," he added as he began to pad swiftly away up the path, drawing me after him.

"Yes, I am growing inside," I assured myself as I for the second night fell asleep on the soft bosom of my family tradition of four posts.

One of the most bromidic performances that human beings indulge in anywhere from their thirty-fifth to eightieth years is to sigh, look wise, and make this remark: "If I could only begin life over again, knowing what I do now!"

I'm never going to be impressed by that again, and I'm going to answer straight out from the shoulder, "Well, it would be a great strain to you if you found yourself doing it."

That was about what my entry into life at Elmnest, Riverfield, Harpeth, was, and in many places it rubbed and hurt my pride; in many places at many times it sapped my courage; in many ways it pruned and probed into my innermost being with a searching knife to see if I really did have any intelligence or soul, and at all times it left me with a feeling of just having been sprouted off the cosmic. I know what I mean, but it doesn't sound as if I did. This is the way most of it happened to me in my first six weeks of life in the rustic.

How did I know that when you cleaned up a house that hadn't been cleaned up for about fifteen years you must wait for ten days after you came to that realization for a sunshiny day, and carry all the beds out in the yard before you began, and that no matter how much awful dust and cobwebs you swept and mopped out or how much old furniture you polished until it reflected your face, it was all perfectly futile unless the bed-sunning ceremony had been first observed? Just how were the ability to speak French in the most exclusive circles of Parisian society and a cultivated knowledge of every picture-gallery in the world going to keep me from making a blunder that would put me down in Mrs. Pennie Addcock's mind as a barbarian?

"Why, Mrs. Tillett and me have been getting ready all along to come and help you beat and sun the beds the first sunshiny day and then turn to with our buckets and mops and brooms. Now you've gone and done the wrong thing by all this polishing before a single bed had been beat and aired." As she spoke Mrs. Addcock surveyed my house, upon which I had spent every waking moment of my muscular strength, assisted by Polly Corn-tassel and sometimes Bud of the blue eyes, but not at all by Rufus, who resented the cleansing process to such an extent that he wrapped up his jaw in a piece of old flannel and retired to the hay-loft when Bud and Polly and I insisted on invading the horrors of his kitchen.

"Oh, my dear Mrs. Addcock, won't you and Mrs. Tillett please forgive me for being so ignorant and help me do it to-day?" I pleaded as I picked up a small Tillett, who was peeping soft wooing at me from where he balanced himself on uncertain and chubby legs against his mother's skirts.

"Well, in this case there is just nothing else to do, but turn to on the beds now, wrong end first, but next year you'll know," she answered me with indulgent compromise in her voice. "And I guess we'll find some broom and mop work yet to be done. Come on, Mrs. Tillett. I guess Nancy can mind the baby all right while we work."

"Oh, he ain't no trouble now except he wants to find out all about the world by tasting of it. Don't let him eat a worm or sech, and he'll be all right," answered the beaming young mother of the toddler. "And, Miss Nancy, I was jest going to tell you that I have got a nice pattern of a plain kind of work dress if you would like to use it," she added as she pointedly did not look at my peasant's smock that hung in such lovely long lines that I found myself pausing much too often before one of the mirrors in the big living-room to admire them. Mrs. Tillett's utility costume was of blue checked gingham and had no lines at all except top and bottom, with a belt in between. Both ladies wore huge gingham aprons, and I must say that they looked like the utility branch of the feminine species while I may have resembled the ornamental. But they were dear neighbors, and the Tillett baby and I had a very busy and happy day with the Golden Bird and his busy family while the two missionaries did over every bed in Elmnest, even invading the living-room and shaking out the cushions of the old couch in the very face of one of the charges of Xerxes' army. I put his babykins in a big feed-basket in a nest of hay, and the two lamb twins came and licked him every now and then by way of welcome into my barn nursery. The fine young sheep mother was now in blooming health, and the valuable progeny were growing by the hours, most of which they spent at the maternal fount, opposite each other and both small tails going like a new variety of speedometer.

"I see mother ewe knows enough to hang around the lady of the barn and feed-bins. Those lambkins are two pounds heavier than any born within a week of them at Plunkett's," Pan had said not a week past, and both sheep mother and I had beamed with gratified pride at his commendation.



Then while the renovation of the four-posters went on with a happy buzz, I busied myself in and out and about with the numberless details of care of the Bird family. My knowledge of music earned by many long hours in the practice of harmonics and a delighted and diligent attendance at the opera seasons of New York, Berlin, and Paris, to say nothing of Boston and London, had not, in my new life, in any way aided me to see that I had made a mistake in ordering a three-hundred-egg incubator to start building a prize flock with Mr. Golden Bird and the ten Ladies Leghorn, but in this case Adam had guided me from off that shoal, and by telegram I had changed the order for three fifty-egg improved metal mothers and the implements needed in accomplishing their maternal purpose. In one of them were now fifty beautiful white pearls that I could not refrain from visiting and regarding through the little window in the metallic side of the metallic mother at least several times an hour, though I knew that twice a day to regulate the heat and fill the lamp was sufficient.

"I don't believe I'll be able to stand seeing them hop out," I remarked to Baby Tillett, the lambkins, and the good old red ally, who was patiently seated on a box over fifteen of the pearls. Adam had kept the poor old darling covering some white china eggs for nearly two weeks before he gave her the pearls on the same day we put the forty-five in the interior of her metal rival. I didn't at first understand his sinister purpose in thus holding her back until the metal rival could get an even start, but I did later.

"I hope you have a mighty good hatching, Nancy, but I have no faith in half-way measures, and a tin box is a half-way measure for a hen, just as cleaning house without bed-sunning is trifling," said Mrs. Addcock, with a final prod as she came out to the barn with Mrs. Tillett to reclaim Baby Tillett.

"You ain't married, Miss Nancy, and you won't understand how babies need mothers, even the chicken kind," said Mrs. Tillett, as she cuddled Baby Tillett gurglingly against her shoulder and followed in the wake of Mrs. Addcock with the mops and buckets down the walk and around the house.

I stood beside the tin triumph of science, with my baby lambs licking at my hands, while Mrs. Ewe nuzzled for corn in one of my huge pockets, and a baby collie, which Pan had brought the week before, when her eyes were scarcely open, tumbled about my feet, and looked after the retreating women—and I did understand.

"Still, I'll do the best I can by your—your progeny, Mr. G. Bird," I said as the great big, white old fellow came and pecked in my pocket for corn in perfect friendliness with Mrs. Ewe.

I was called upon to keep my promise in less than a week. It might have been a tragedy if Bess Rutherford's practical sense had not helped save my affections from a panic. This is how it happened.

"Yes, chicken culture is a germ that spreads by contagion. I'm not at all surprised at your friends," Adam had answered when I had appealed to him to know if I could sell Bess Rutherford just six of the baby chicks, when they came out, for her to begin a brood in a new back-yard system, only Bess is so progressive that she is having a nice big place in the conservatory that opens out of her living-room cleared for them to run about out of their tin mother when they want to. She says she believes eternal vigilance is the price of success with poultry as the book she bought, which is different from mine, says, and Bess decided that she wanted her chickens where she could go in to see them comfortably when she came from parties and things without having to go around in the back yard, which is the most lovely garden in Hayesville anyway, in her slippers and party clothes. "I'd sell her the chicks at twenty dollars apiece, and that's cheap if they produce as they ought to with their blood and such—such care as she intends to bestow on them. The twenty-dollar price will either cure her or start an idle woman into a producer," said Adam, in answer to my request, as he cut me out a pair of shoes from a piece of hide like that which the shoes upon his own feet were made from. It was raining, and I sat at his feet in the barn and laboriously sewed what he had cut.

I told Bess what Adam said, and she paid me the hundred and twenty dollars right on the spot, and then insisted on opening the incubator at the regular time for the ten minutes the book directs, to cool off the eggs night and morning, and putting her monogram on six of the eggs. To do this she decided to stay all night, and telephoned her maid, Annette, to pack her bag and let Matthew bring it out to her when he came to help Polly Corn-tassel put their first batch of eggs into their incubator. Matthew had bought twenty hens and two nice brotherly roosters, and they had almost caught up with me in the number of their brown babies on the whole shells. Matthew had been coming out night and morning ever since he had brought out his and the Beesleys' poultry and had either had supper with us at Elmnest or we had both got riz biscuits and peach preserves and chicken fried with Aunt Mary and Uncle Silas and Polly and Bud. I had subjugated Rufus into cooking a few canned things, for which I had traded one of his pig jaws at the bank-post-office-grocery emporium, and Uncle Silas had thrown in a few potatoes, and Adam had brought me a great bag of white beans from across Paradise Ridge, so the diet at Elmnest had changed slightly. The absorbed twins had never noticed it at all; only they displayed more hearty vigor in attacking the problems of literature and history that absorbed them. Also almost every day Pan brought me young green things that were sprouting in the woods, and I cooked them for him in an old iron pot down by the spring-house and had supper with him.

"Those two dears are the most precious old Rips I ever beheld," said Bess when we had retired to my room after supper on the fateful night of our near tragedy. "You are so fortunate, Ann, to have two delicious fathers in name only. Mine pokes into my business at all angles and insists on so much attention from me that I don't know how I'll amount to anything in this world. He says it takes a very fine and brainy woman to earn about ten thousand dollars a year being affectionate and agreeable to her own father, and that I get so much because there is no possible competition as I am an only child, but all the same it looks like unearned money to me. Just wait until those six little chickens begin to earn me a hundred dollars a month like my book guarantees they will do in their second year; then I'm going to show dad just how much I love him for himself and give him back my bank-book."

"Still it is an awful lot of work, Bess," I remonstrated feebly, because I knew that I couldn't have made myself believe all I had learned in just two months at Elmnest the day I started in business.

"You know, Ann, I told you about that wonderful Evan Baldwin who has been in Hayesville two or three times this winter, the man to whom the governor gave the portfolio of agriculture, I believe they call it. Well, he was at the Old Hickory ball the other night when you wouldn't come, and I told him all about you and about buying those little chickens from you, and he was so wonderful and sympathetic that Owen Murray sulked dreadfully. He encouraged me entirely and told me a lot of things about some of his experiment stations in all the different States. You thought you were going to stagger me with that twenty-dollar price on those chicks in shell, but he said he had paid as much as five hundred dollars apiece for a few eggs he got from some prize chickens in England and had brought them over in a basket in his own hand. He said he thought from what I told him about the Golden Bird that twenty would be about right for one of his sons or daughters. Ann, he is a perfectly delicious man, and you must meet him. It is awful the way all the girls and women just follow him in droves, though I'm sure he doesn't seem to notice us."

"I never want to lay eyes on him, Bess. He has insulted me and I never—" but just here a thought struck me in my solar plexus and crinkled me entirely up. "Oh, Bess, I forgot to fill the lamp in the incubator to-night, and I believe the chicken eggs will be all chilled to death. What will I do? It is near midnight and it's—it's—c—cold."

"Let's get 'em quick and maybe we can resuscitate 'em. Don't you remember about reviving frozen people in that first-aid class we had just after the war broke out and we didn't know whether we were in it or not? Come on, quick!" Bess seized the quilt from the bed and descended into the back yard, clad only in her lingerie for sleeping, a silk robe-de-chambre and satin mules, while I followed, likewise garmented.

"Oh, dear, how cold," wailed Bess as the frosty Spring air poured around us in our flight to the barn.

"Put the quilt around you," I chattered.

"I'm going to put all the egg chickens in it," she answered as we scuttled into the barn out of the wind.

"The lamp is out, but the eggs still feel warm to the hand," I said as I knelt in deep contrition beside the metal hen.

"Fill it and light it, and they'll soon warm up," advised Bess.

"There's no oil on the place. I forgot it," I again wailed.

"Isn't there room under the hen here?" asked Bess, with the brilliant mind she inherited from Mr. Rutherford running over the speed limit, and as she spoke she felt under the old Red Ally, who only clucked good naturedly.

"It feels like she is covering a hundred now, and there's no room for more," said Bess, answering herself with almost a wail in her voice. "What will we do? The book says April-hatched chickens are the best, and these would have come out in just a few days."

And then from somewhere in my heart, which had harbored the cuddle of the cold lamb babies against it, there rose a knowledge of first aid for the near-baby chickens.

"Oh, Bess," I exclaimed, "let's wrap the tray of eggs up in the quilt and take it up-stairs to bed with us. We are just as warm as the hen, and I'll get Rufus to go for Polly at daylight to fix the lamp while we stay in bed and huddle them until the incubator warms up, as it does in just an hour after it's lighted."

"Ann, you are both maternal and intellectual," said Bess, with the deepest admiration in her voice. "Let's hurry or we'll never get warmed up ourselves."

And in very much less time than could be imagined Bess Rutherford and I were in the middle of the four-poster, sunk deep into the feathers with the precious pearls of life carefully imbedded between us.

"Now don't joggle," Bess commanded as we got all settled and tucked in.

"Mrs. Tillett lets little Tillett sleep with her cold nights," I murmured drowsily.

"I don't believe it; no woman would undertake the responsibility of human life like that," Bess answered as she tucked in a loose end of cover under the pillow.

"Most of the world mothers sleep with their babies," Adam said when I told him about little Tillett, "and—" I was answering when I trailed off into a dream of walking a tight rope over a million white eggs. In the morning Bess said she had dreamed that she was a steam roller trying to make a road of eggs smooth enough to run her car over.



CHAPTER VII

Also Bess and I woke to find ourselves heroines. Matthew came to breakfast after he had seen the lamps in his mock hens burning brightly, and brought Polly with him to congratulate us on the rescue of our infant industry. Polly had told him of our brilliant coup against old Jack Frost, and he was all enthusiasm, as was also Uncle Cradd, while father beamed because he was hearing me praised and thought of something else at the same time. Later Owen Murray came out for Bess in his car, and insisted on buying six more of the eggs, because, he said, they had now become a sporting proposition and interested him. Bess agreed to board them to maturity in her conservatory for him at fifty cents a day per head and let him visit them at any time. He gave me a check immediately. He offered to buy six of Polly's chicks at the same price, but Matthew refused to let her sell them at all, and also Bess refused to have any mixing of breeds in her conservatory. Polly didn't know enough to resent losing the hundred and twenty dollars, because she had never had more than fifty cents in her life, and Matthew didn't realize what it would have meant to her to have that much money, because he had more than he needed all his life, so they were all happy and laughed through one of Rufus' worst hog effusions in the way of a meal for lunchers, but—but I had in a month learned to understand what a dollar might mean to a man or woman, and at the thought of that two hundred and forty dollars Mr. G. Bird and family had earned for me in their second month of my ownership my courage arose and girded up its loins for the long road ahead. I knew enough to know that these returns were a kind of isolated nugget in the poultry business, and yet why not?

"We'll sell Mr. Evan Baldwin a five-hundred-dollar gold egg yet, Mr. G. Bird," I said to myself.

After luncheon they all departed and left me to my afternoon's work. Matthew lingered behind the others and helped me feed the old red ally and Mrs. Ewe and Peckerwood Pup.

"I was talking to Evan Baldwin at the club after his first lecture the other night and, Ann, I believe I'll be recruited for the plow as well as for the machine-gun. I'm going to buy some land out there back of the Beesleys' and raise sheep on it. He says Harpeth is losing millions a year by not raising sheep. I'm going to live at Riverfield a lot of the time and motor back and forth to business. Truly, Ann, the land bug has bit me and—and it isn't just—just to come up on your blind side. But, dear, now don't you think that it would be nice for me to live over here with you as a perfectly sympathetic agricultural husband?"

"I needed a husband so much more yesterday to help with the pruning of the rose-vines than I do to-day, Matthew," I answered with a laugh. Matthew's proposals of marriage are so regular and so alike that I have to avoid monotony in the wit of my answers.

"I'm never in time to do a single thing on this place, and I don't see how everything gets done for you without my help. Who helps you?"

"Everybody," I answered. I had never had the courage to break Adam to Matthew in the long weeks I had been seeing them both every day, and of course Pan had never come out of the woods when Matthew or any of the rest were there. "I'll tell you what you can do for me," I said, with a sudden inspiration about getting rid of him, for the red-headed Peckerwood had promised to come and put some kind of hoodoo earth around the peonies and irises and pinks in my garden, also to bud some kind of a new rose on one of the old blush ones, and I wanted the place quiet so he would venture out of his lair. "You can go on to town and look after Polly carefully. She is going in with Bess for the first time since their infatuation, and I want her eyes to open gradually on the world out over Paradise Ridge."

"Ann, ought they ever to open?" asked Matthew, suddenly, with the color coming up to the roots of his hair and burning in his ears like it still does in Bud Corn-tassel's when he comes over to see or help me or to bring me something from Aunt Mary, his mother. "Bess is one of the best of friends I've got in the world, but I just—just couldn't see Corn-tassel dancing in some man's arms in the mere hint of an evening gown that Bess occupied while fox-trotting with Evan Baldwin at the club the other night."

"Who was the belle of the ball, Matt?" I asked him, with a flame in my cheeks, for the pink and lavender chiffon gown Bess had worn was one of the Voudaine creations that I had brought from Paris and sold her after the crash.

"Oh, Bess always is when you are not there and, Ann, don't for a moment think that I—I—" Poor Matthew was stuttering while I rubbed the tip of my nose against his sleeve in the way of a caress, as I had a feed-bucket in one hand and a water-pan in the other.

"Do go and shop with Polly and Bess as a force for protection. I must have a quiet afternoon to commune with my garden," I commanded.

"Sometimes you make me so mad, Ann Craddock, that—that—" Matthew was stuttering when Uncle Cradd appeared at the back door to chat with him, and I made my escape through the barn and out into the woods. I had thought that I saw a glint of Peckerwood red pass through the pasture that way, and I was determined that Pan shouldn't give me and the garden the slip as he always did when he saw anybody around.

As I ran rapidly through the old pasture, which was overgrown with buckbushes and sassafras sprouts, which were turning into great pink and green fern clumps in the warm April sunshine, I gave the two or three Saint-Saens Delilah notes which had been robbed of any of their wicked Delilah flavor for me by having heard Mr. G. Bird sing them so beautifully on the stage of the Metropolitan in that first dream night in Elmnest. But I called and then called in vain until at last I came out to the huge old rock that juts out from the edge of the rugged little knoll at the far end of the pasture. Here I paused and looked down on Elmnest in the afternoon sunshine with what seemed to be suddenly newly opened eyes. I had been in and out of Elmnest to such an extent for the last six weeks that I hadn't had a chance to get off and look at it from an outsider's standpoint, and now suddenly I was taking that view of it. The old rose and green brick house, covered in by its wide, gray shingle roof, the gables and windows of which were beginning to be wreathed in feathery and pink young vines, which were given darker notes here and there in their masses by the sturdy green of the honey-suckles, hovered down on a small plateau rear-guarded by the barn and sheds, flanked by the garden and the gnarled old orchard, and from its front door the long avenue of elms led far down to the group of Riverfield houses that huddled at the other end. All villages in the State of Harpeth have been so built around the old "great houses" of the colonial landowners, and between their generations has been developed a communistic life that I somehow feel is to bridge from the pioneer life of this country to the great new life of the greater commune that is coming to us. Down there in Riverfield I knew that there was sin and sorrow and birth and death, but there was no starvation, and for every tragedy there was a neighbor to reach out a helping hand, and for every joy there were hearty and friendly rejoicings.

"Oh, and I'm one of them—I belong," I said to myself as I noted each cottage into which I went and came at will, as friend and beloved neighbor. Even at that distance I could see a small figure, which I knew to be Luella Spain, running up the long avenue, and in its hand I detected something that, I was sure, was a covered plate or dish. "And I'm making Elmnest fulfil its destiny into the future—into the future that the great Evan Baldwin is preaching about in town, instead of practicing out in the fields. I wonder if he really knows a single thing about farming."

"He does," came an answer from right at my shoulder in Pan's flutiest voice, and I turned to find him standing just behind me on the very edge of the old tilting rock.

"How do you know?" I demanded of him as I took the clean white cloth tied up at four corners, gypsy-fashion, which he offered me and which, I could see, was fairly bursting with green leaves of a kind I had never seen before.

"I was with him at the Metropolitan the night I saw Ann Craddock in Gale Beacon's box, you know,—the night that Mr. G. Bird sang 'Delilah,' and also I've slept on the bare ground with him in his woods in Michigan and on his red clay in Georgia."

"Well, I hate him all the same for the insult of his offer to buy Elmnest, though I doubt if he has any family pride or any family either, so, of course, he wouldn't understand that it is an insult to offer to buy one's colonial home with holes in the door to shoot Indians through," I answered with the temper that always came at the mention of the name of a man I had chosen to consider a foe without any consent on his part at all.

"You'd think he was born and raised in a hollow log if you should ever interview him, and he hasn't any family, but from some of the motions he is making, I think he intends to have," answered Pan, with one of his most fluty jeers, and he shook his head until the crests ruffled still lower over the tips of his ears.

"Are you—you one of his agents—that is, spies, and was it you that insulted me by wanting to buy Elmnest just because it was poor and old?" I demanded, with the color in my cheeks.

"I am not his spy or his agent, and do you want to come down to the spring-house and cook these wild-mustard shoots for our dinner, or shall I go at our old garden with the prospect of an empty stomach at sunset?"

"Why won't you come in to dinner with me?" I asked, with a mollified laugh, though I knew I was bringing down upon myself about my hundredth refusal of proffered hospitality.

"Two reasons—first, because I won't eat with my neighbors at the 'great house' when I can't eat with them in the cottage, and I just can't eat the grease that a lot of the poorer villagers deluge their food with. I'm Pan, and I live in the woods on roots and herbs. Second—because about six weeks ago I found a farm woman who would come out at my wooing to cook and eat the herbs and roots with me and I could have her to myself all alone. Now, will you come on down to the spring?" And without waiting for my reply, Adam started down the hill, crosswise from the path by which I had ascended, padding ahead in his weird leather sandals and breaking a path for me through the undergrowth as I followed close at his shoulder, an order of rough travel to which I had become accustomed in the weeks that had passed and that now seemed to me—well, I might say racial.

In the riot of an April growing day, in which we could hear life fairly teem and buzz at our feet, on right, and left, and overhead, Adam and I worked shoulder to shoulder in the old garden of Elmnest. Every now and then I ran down to the spring to put a green fagot under the pot of herbs, which needed to simmer for hours to be as delicious as was possible for them. From the library came a rattle and bang of literary musketry from the blessed parental twins, who were for the time being with Julius Caesar in "all Gaul," and oblivious to anything in the twentieth century, even a spring-intoxicated niece and daughter down in her grandmother's garden with a Pan from the woods; occasionally Rufus rattled a pot or a pan; but save for these few echoes of civilization, Adam and I delved and spaded and clipped and pruned and planted in the old garden just as if it had been the plot of ground without the walls of Eden in which our first parents were forced to get busy.

"Great work, Farmwoman," said Adam as we sat down on the side steps to eat, bite-about, the huge red apple he had taken from the bundle of emigrant appearance which he always carried over his shoulder on the end of a long hickory stick and which I had by investigation at different times found to contain everything from clean linen to Sanskrit poetry for father. To-day I found the manuscript score of a new opera by no less a person than Hurter himself, which he insisted on having me hum through with him while we ate the apple.

"I told Hurter I thought that fourth movement wouldn't do, and now I know it after hearing you try it through an apple," said Pan as he rose from beside me, tied the manuscript up in the bandana bundle, and picked up his long pruning-knife. "Now, Woman, we'll put a curb on the rambling of every last rambler in this garden and then we can lay out the rows for Bud to plant with the snap beans to-morrow." Adam, from the first day he had met me, had addressed me simply with my generic class name, and I had found it a good one to which to make answer. Also Adam had shown me the profit and beauty of planting all needful vegetables mixed up with the flowers in the rich and loamy old garden, and had adjusted a cropping arrangement between the Corn-tassel Bud and me that was to be profitable to us both, Bud only doing in odd hours the work I couldn't do, and getting a share of the profits.

"Don't work me to death to-day," I pleaded, and told him about the rescue of the babies Bird with so much dramatic force that his laughter rang out with such volume that old Rufus came to the kitchen window to look out and shake his head, and I knew he was muttering about "Peckerwoods," "devils," and the sixth day of the week. "Will the chicks live all right, do you think?" I asked anxiously.

"They're safe if they never got cold to the touch and you didn't joggle 'em too much. Do either you or Miss Rutherford happen to er—er—kick in your sleep?"

"We do not!" I answered with dignity, as I snipped away a dead branch of ivy from across the path.

"I just thought Miss Rutherford might from—"

"You don't know Bess; she's so executive that—"

"That she wouldn't kick eggs for anything," finished Pan, mockingly. "She does pretty well in the Russian ballet, doesn't she?"

"Oh, I wish you could just see her in the 'Cloud Wisp'!" I exclaimed, with the greatest pride, for Bess Rutherford has nothing to envy Pavlova about.

"I have—er—have a great desire to so behold her at some future time," answered Pan, with one of his eery laughs, and I could almost see hoofs through the raw hide of his shoes. I would have ruffled the red crests off of the tips of his ears to see if they really were pointed if he had not stood just out of reach of my hand, where it would have been impossible to catch him if I tried.

"You won't eat with me in civilization, you won't meet any of my friends, and I don't believe you ever want to please me," I said as I turned away from his provocation and began again with the scissors.

"I don't like world girls," he said with the fluty coo in his voice that always calms the Ladies Leghorn when they are ruffled. "I only love farm women. The moon is beginning to get a rise out of the setting sun, and let's go away from these haunts of men to our own woods home. Come along!" As he spoke Pan pocketed his long knife, picked up his stick and bundle, and began to pad away through the trees down towards the spring, with me at his shoulder, and for the first time he held my hand in his as I followed in my usual squaw style.

In all the long dreary weeks that followed I was glad that I had had that dinner at sunset and moonrise with him down in the cove at the spring that was away from all the world. All during the days that never seemed to end, as I went upon my round of duties, I put the ache of the memories of it from me, but in the night I took the agony into my heart and cherished it.

"And it's the Romney hand ye have with the herb-pot, Woman dear," said Adam as he squatted down beside our simmering pot and stirred it with the clean hickory stick I had barked for that purpose when, very shortly after high noon, I had put the greens, with the two wild onion sprigs and the handful of inevitable black-walnut kernels, into the iron pot set on the two rocks with their smoldering green fire between. "You know you'd rather be eating this dinner of sprouts and black bread with your poor Adam than—than dancing that 'Cloud Drift' in town with Matthew Berry—or Baldwin the enemy."

"Yes," I answered, as I knelt beside him and thrust in another slim stick and tasted the juice of the pot off the end. "But it would be hard to make Matthew believe it. I forgot to tell you that Matt is really going in for farming, thanks to the evil influence of your friend Evan Baldwin, who wouldn't know a farm if he met one on the road, a real farm, I mean. Poor Matt little knows the life of toil he is plotting for himself."

"Is he coming to live at Elmnest?" asked Adam, in a voice of entire unconcern, as he took the black loaf from his gypsy pack and began to cut it up into hunks and lay it on the clean rock beside the pot.

"He is not," I answered with an indignation that I could see no reason for.

"Sooner or later, Woman, you'll have to take a mate," was the primitive statement that confronted me as I lifted the pot with the skirt of my blouse and poured the greens into two brown crockery bowls that Adam kept secreted with the pot on a ledge of the old spring-house.

"Well, a husky young farmer is the only kind of a man who need apply. I mean a born rustic. I couldn't risk an amateur with the farm after all you've taught me," I answered as we seated ourselves on the warm earth side by side and began to dip the hunks of black bread into our bowls and lift the delicious wilted leaves to our mouths with it, a mode of consumption it had taken Pan several attempts to teach me. Pan never talks when he eats, and he seems to browse food in a way that each time tempts me more and more to reach out my hand and lift one of the red crests to see about the points of his ears.

"Do you want to hear my invocation to my ultimate woman?" he asked as he set his bowl down after polishing it out with his last chunk of bread some minutes after I had so finished up mine.

"Is it more imperative than the one you give me under my window before I have had less than a good half-night's sleep every morning?" I asked as I crushed a blade of meadow fern in my hands and inhaled its queer tang.

"I await my beloved in Grain fields. Come, woman! In thy eyes is truth. Thy body must give food with Sweat of labor, and thy lips Hold drink for love thirst. I am thy child. I am thy mate. Come!"

Pan took my hand in his as he chanted, and held my fingers to his lips, and ended his chant with several weird, eery, crooning notes blown across his lips and through my fingers out into the moonlit shadows.

"I feel about you just as I do about one of Mrs. Ewe's lambkins," I whispered, with a queer answering laugh in my voice, which held and repeated the croon in his.

"I am thy child. I am thy mate. Oh, come!"

again chanted Pan, and it surely wasn't imagination that made me think that the red crests ruffled in the wind. The light in his eyes was unlike anything I had ever seen; it smouldered and flamed like the embers under the pot beside the rock. It drew me until the sleeve of my smock brushed his sleeve of gray flannel. His arms hovered, but didn't quite enclose me.

"And the way I am going to feel about all the little chickens out of the incubator," I added slowly as if the admission was being drawn out of me. Still the arms hovered, the crests ruffled, and the eyes searched down into the depths of me, which had so lately been plowed and harrowed and sown with a new and productive flower.

"And the old twin fathers," I added almost begrudgingly, as I cast him my last treasure.

Then with a laugh that I know was a line-reproduction descended from the one that Adam gave when he first recognized Eve, Pan folded me into his arms, laid his red head on my breast, and held up his lips to mine with a "love-thirst" that it took me more than a long minute to slack to the point of words.

"I knew there was one earth woman due to develop at the first decade of this century, and I've found her," Pan fluted softly as he in turn took me on his breast and pressed his russet cheek against the tan of mine. "I'm going to take her off into the woods and then in a generation salvation for the nation will come forth from the forest."

"My word is given to the Golden Bird to see his progeny safe into the world, and I must do that before—" but my words ended in a laugh as I slipped out of Pan's arms and sprang to my feet and away from him.

"We'll keep that faith with Mr. Bird to-night, and then I can take you with me before daylight," said Pan as he collected his Romney bundle with his left hand and me with his right and began to pad up the path from the spring-house towards the barn under a shower of the white locust-blossoms, which were giving forth their last breath of perfume in a gorgeous volume.

"To-night?" I asked from the hollow between his breast and his arm where I was fitted and held steadily so that my steps seemed to be his steps and the breath of my lungs to come from his.

"Yes; most of the eggs were pipped when I went in the barn to put away the tools," answered Adam, with very much less excitement than the occasion called for.

"Oh, why—why didn't you tell me?" I demanded as I came out of the first half of a kiss and before I retired into the last half.

"Too hungry—had to be fed before they got to eating at your heart," answered Pan in a way that made me know that he meant me and not the dandelion greens and brown bread.

"You are joking me; they are not due until day after to-morrow," I said as I took my lips away and began to hurry us both towards the barn.

"All April hatches are from two to three days early," was Adam's prosaic and instructive answer that cut the last kiss short as we entered the barn-door.



CHAPTER VIII

Quickly I released myself from his arm and flew to kneel in front of the metal mother, with the electric torch aimed directly into the little window that revealed all her inmost processes. The Peckerwood Pan hovered just at my shoulder, and together we beheld what was to me the most wonderful phenomenon of nature that had ever come my way. No sunset from Pike's Peak or high note from the throat of Caruso could equal it in my estimation. Behold, the first baby Bird stepped forth into the world right before my astonished and enraptured eyes! It was in this manner.

"Look, right here next to the glass," said Adam, as he put his finger against the lower left-hand corner of the peep window, and there I directed my torch. One of the great white pearls had a series of little holes around one end of it, and while I gazed a sharp little beak was thrust suddenly from within it. The shell fell apart, and out stepped the first small Leghorn Bird with an assurance that had an undoubted resemblance to that of his masculine parent. For a moment he blinked and balanced; then he stretched his small wings and shook himself, an operation that seemed to fluff about fifty per cent. of the moist aspect from his plump little body, and then he deliberately turned and looked into my wide-opened eyes. I promptly gasped and sat down on the barn floor, with my head weakly cuddled against Adam's knee.

"Two more here on the right-hand side, Woman," said Adam, as he knelt beside me, took the torch, supported me in my reaction of astonishment, and showed me where a perfect little batch of babies was being born. "Whew, Farmer Craddock, but those are fine chickens! Heaven help us, but they are all exploding at one time! Only eggs of one hundred per cent. vigor and fertility hatch that way. Look at the moisture gathering on the glass. If you put your hand in there you would find it about a hundred and ten."

"Oh, look! G. Bird Junior, the first, is almost dry. Please, please let me take him in my hand!" I exclaimed as that five-minute-old baby pressed close up against the glass and blinked at the light and us bewitchingly.

"You mustn't open the door for at least twelve hours now. Come away before the temptation overcomes you," commanded Pan.

"Wait twelve hours to take that fluff-ball in my hands? Adam, you are cruel," I said, as he pocketed the torch and left the drama of birth dark and without footlights. As he padded away towards the moonlit barn-door, I followed him in reluctant protest.

"Do you see that tall pine outlined against the sky over there on Paradise Ridge, Woman?" asked Adam, with the Pan lights and laugh coming back into his farmer eyes and voice. "I have got to be there an hour before dawn, and it is fifteen good miles or more. I want to roll against a log somewhere and sleep a bit, and it is now after ten o'clock. Go get your bundle, and I'll hang it on my stick, and we will disappear into the forest forever. I know a hermit who'll put us in marriage bonds. Come!" As he held out his arms Adam began to chant the weird tune to that mate song of his own invention.

"You know I can't do that," I said as I went into his embrace and drank the chant down into my heart. "There are so many live things that I must stay to watch over. I—I'm their—mother as well as—as yours. They must be fed."

"God, there really is such a thing as a woman," said Adam as he hid his smouldering eyes against my lips. "You'll be waiting when I come back, and you'll go with me the minute I call, if it's day or night? You'll be ready with your bundle?"

"You don't mean at daylight to-morrow, do you, Pan, dear?" I asked, with one of the last laughs that my heart was to know, for sometimes, it seemed forever, rippling out past his crimson crests.

"No; listen to me, Woman," said Adam, as he held me tenderly on his right arm and took both my hands in his and held them pressed hard against my breast. "I am going away to-night, and I don't know when I can get back. I only knew to-day I'd have to go; that's why I—I took you and put my brand on your heart to-night. I can leave you aloose in the forest and know that I'll find you mine when I can come back. But, oh, come with me!"

"I wouldn't be your earth woman, Adam, if I left all these helpless things. I'll wait for you, and no matter when you come I'll be ready. Only, only you'll never take me quite away from them all, will you?"

"No; I'll build a nest over there in the big woods, and you can go back and forth between my—my brood and Mr. G. Bird's," promised Adam with Pan's fluty laugh.

"Branded, and I don't even know the initials on the brand," I said to myself as I stood on the front steps under a honeysuckle vine that was twining with a musky rose in a death struggle as to the strength of their perfumes, and watched Adam go padding swiftly and silently away from me down the long avenue of elms. A mocking-bird in a tree over by the fence was pouring out showers of notes of liquid love, and ringdoves cooed and softly nestled up under the eaves above my head. "I'm a woman and I've found my mate. I am going to be part of it all," I said to myself as I sank to the step and began to brood with the night around me.

I think that God gives it sometimes to a woman to have a night in which she sits alone brooding her love until somehow it waxes so strong and brave that it can face death by starvation and cold and betrayal and still live triumphant. It is so that He recreates His children.

"Now, of course, Ann, everybody admires your pluck about this retiring from the world and becoming a model rustic, but it does seem to me that you might admit that some of your old friends have at least a part of the attraction for you that is vested in, well, say old Mrs. Red Ally, for instance. Will you or will you not come in to dine and to wine and to dance at the country club with Matthew Saturday evening?" Bess delivered herself of the text of her mission to me before she descended from her cherry roadster in front of the barn.

"Oh, Bess, just come and see old Mrs. Red and never, never ask me to feel about a mere friend of my childhood like I do about her," I answered with welcome and excitement both in my voice. "Do come quick and look!"

"Coming," answered Bess, with delightful enthusiasm and no wounded pride, as she left the car in one motion and swept into the barn with me in about two more.

"Now, just look at that," I said as I opened the top of the long box that is called a brooder and is supposed to supplement the functions of the metal incubator mother in the destiny of chicken young. It has feed and water-pans in it, straw upon the floor as a carpet, and behind flannel portieres is supposed to burn a lamp with mother ardor sufficient to keep the small fledglings warm, though orphaned. Did the week-old babies Leghorn have to be content with such mechanical mothering? Not at all! Right in the middle of the brooder sat the old Red Ally, and her huge red wings were stretched out to cover about twenty-five of the metal-born babies and part of her own fifteen, and spread in a close, but fluffy, circle around her were the rest of her adopted family all cosily asleep and happy at heart. "I left the top of the brooder open while I went for water the second day after hers and the incubator's had hatched, and when I came back she was just as you see her now, in possession of the entire orphan-asylum."

"Oh, look, she's putting some out from under her and taking others in. Oh, Ann!" exclaimed Bess as she dropped on her knees beside the long box.

"Yes; she changes them like that. I've seen her do it," I answered, with my cheeks as pink with excitement as were those of my sympathetic friend, Elizabeth Rutherford. "And you ought to see her take them all out for a walk across the grass. They all peep and follow, and she clucks and scratches impartially."

"Ann," said Bess, with a great solemnity in the dark eyes that she raised to mine, "I suppose I ought to marry Owen this June. I want to have another winter of good times, but I—I'm ashamed to look this hen in the face."

"Owen is perfectly lovely," I answered her, which was a very safely noncommittal answer in the circumstances.

"He carries one of the chickens he bought from you in his pocket all the time, with all necessary food, and it is much larger than any of mine or his in my conservatory. Owen is the one who goes in to tend to them when he brings me home from parties and things and—and—"

"Matthew took off all of his and Polly's little Reds yesterday, and I've never seen him so—so—" I paused for a word to express the tenderness that was in dear old Matt's face as he put the little tan fluff-balls one at a time into Polly Corn-tassel's outstretched skirt.

"Matthew is a wonder, Ann, and you've got to come to this dance he is giving Corn-tassel Saturday—all for love of you because you asked him to look after her. He is the sweetest thing to her—just like old Mrs. Red here, spreads his wings and fusses if any man who isn't a lineal descendant of Sir Galahad comes near her. He's going to be awfully hurt if you don't come."

"Then I'll tear myself away from my family and come, though I truly can't see that I wished Polly Corn-tassel upon all of you. You are just as crazy about the apple-blossom darling as I am, you specially, Bess Rutherford," I answered, with pleased indignation.

"Ann, I do wish you could have seen her in that frilled white thing with the two huge blue bows at the ends of the long plaits at my dinner-dance the other night, standing and looking at everybody with all the fascination and coquetry of—of—well, that little Golden Bird peeping at us from the left-hand corner of Mrs. Red Ally's right wing. Where did she get that frock?"

"Do you suppose that a woman who runs a farm dairy of fifty cows, while her husband banks and post-offices and groceries would be at all routed by a few yards of lace and muslin and a current copy of 'The Woman's Review'? Aunt Mary made that dress between sun-up and -down and worked out fifty pounds of butter as well," I answered, with a glow of class pride in my rustic breast.

"All of that is what is seething in my blood until I can't stand it," said Bess as we walked towards the barn-door. "The reason I just feel like devouring Polly Corn-tassel is that somehow she seems to taste like bread and butter to me; I'm tired of life served with mayonnaise dressing with tabasco and caviar in it.

"Yes, a Romney herb-pot is better," I said, as a strange chant began to play itself on my heartstrings with me alone for a breathless audience.

"And if you come in on Saturday you can—" Bess was saying in a positive tone that admitted of no retreat, when Matthew's huge blue car came around the drive from the front of Elmnest and stopped by Bess's roadster. On the front seat sat Matthew, and Corn-tassel was beside him, but the rest of the car was piled high with huge sacks of grain, which looked extremely sensible and out of place in the handsomest car in the Harpeth Valley.

"Oh, Miss Ann, Mr. Matthew and I found the greatest bargain in winter wheat, and the man opened every sack and let me run my arm to the elbow in it. It is all hard and not short in a single grain. We are going to trade you half." And Polly's blue eyes, which still looked like the uncommercialized violet despite a six weeks' acquaintance with society in Hayesville, danced with true farmer delight.

"It's warranted to make 'em lay in night shifts, Ann," said Matthew as he beamed down upon me with a delight equal to Polly's, and somehow equally as young. "Where'll I put it? In the feed-room in the bins?"

"Yes, and they are almost empty. I was wondering what I would do next for food, because I owe Rufus and the hogs so much," I answered gratefully.

"What did you pay?" asked Bess, in a business-like tone of voice.

"Only a dollar and a quarter a bushel, all seed grade," answered Matthew, with the greatest nonchalance, as if he had known the grades of wheat from his earliest infancy.

"Why, Owen bought two bags of it for our joint family and paid such a fortune for it that I forgot the figures immediately; but I took up the rug and put it all in my dressing-room to watch over, lest thieves break into the garage and steal. Also I made him send me plebeian carnations instead of violets for Belle Proctor's dinner Tuesday," said Bess, with covetousness in her eyes as she watched Matthew begin to unload his wheat. I wonder what Matthew's man, Hickson, at one twenty-five a month, thought of his master's coat when he began to brush the chaff out of its London nap.

"Oh, Owen Murray is just a town-bred duffer," said Matthew, as he shouldered his last sack of grain.

"Well, you are vastly mistaken if you think that—" Bess was beginning to say in a manner that I knew from long experience would bring on a war of words between her and Matthew when a large and cheerful interruption in the shape and person of Aunt Mary Corn-tassel came around the corner of the house.

"Well, well, what sort of city farming is going on to-day amongst all these stylish folks?" she asked as she skirted the two cars at what she considered a safe and respectful distance, and handed me a bunch of sweet clover-pinks with a spring perfume that made me think of the breath of Pan O'Woods as I buried my lips in them. "You, Polly, go right home and take off that linen dress, get into a gingham apron, and begin to help Bud milk. I believe in gavots at parties only if they strengthen muscles for milking time."

"May I wait and ride down with Mr. Matthew and show him where to put our wheat, Mother?" asked Polly as she snuggled up to her mother, who was pinning a stray pink into Matthew's button-hole per his request.

"Yes, if he'll put his legs under old Mrs. Butter to help you get done before I am ready to strain up," answered Aunt Mary, with a merry twinkle in her eye as she regarded Matthew in his purple and fine linen. "Put an apron on him," she added.

"Lead me to the apron," said Matthew, with real and not mock heroics.

"But before you go I want to tell all of you about an invitation that has come over the telephone in the bank to all of Riverfield, and make a consultation about it. Now who do you suppose gave it?"

"Who?" we all asked in chorus.

"Nobody less than the governor of the State called up Silas, me answering for him on account of his deafness, and asked everybody to come in to town next Saturday night to hear this new commissioner of agriculture that he is going to appoint make the opening address of his office, I reckon you could call it. You know Silas is the leading Democrat of this district, and the governor has opened riz biscuits with me many a time. I told him 'Thank you, sir,' we would all come and hear the young man talk about what he didn't know, and he laughed and rang off. Yes, we are all going in a kind of caravan of vehicles, and I want you to go, Nancy, in the family coach and take Mrs. Tillett with you on account of her having to take all the seven little Tilletts, because there won't be a minder woman left to look after 'em. Bud will drive so as not to disturb Cradd or William in their Heathen pursuits or discommode Rufus' disposition. Now, won't it be nice for the whole town to go junketing in like that?" As she spoke Aunt Mary beamed upon us all with pure delight.

"But Saturday evening is the night that Mr. Matthew is going to have that dance for me, Mother," said Polly, with the violets becoming slightly sprinkled underneath the long black lashes.

"Well, dancing can wait a spell," answered Aunt Mary, comfortably. "The governor said that all the folks at Cloverbend and Providence and Hillsboro are going, and Riverfield has got to shake out a forefoot in the trip and not a hind one."

"Oh, we'll have the dance next week, Corn-tassel," promised Matthew, promptly enough to prevent the drenching of the violets. "It will be great to hear Baldwin accept his portfolio, as it were."

"And after his term begins I suppose he'll have offices at the capitol and will be in town most of the time. Then we can have him at all the dances. Polly, he dances like nothing earthly. Still Matthew won't let him come near you; he's deadly to women. We are all positively drugged by him," exclaimed Bess, delighted at the idea of Hayesville society acquiring the new commissioner of agriculture for a permanent light.

"Then I can count on you to help Mrs. Tillett and the children in and out, Nancy?" continued Aunt Mary, with the light of such generalship in her eye that I was afraid even to mention my one-sided feud with the hero of the hour. "You can take Baby Tillett and sit a little way apart from her so she won't have to feed him all the time to keep him quiet."

"I can take eight people in my car, Mother Corn-tassel," said Matthew, with the most beautiful eagerness.

"I can get in five," added Bess, with an equal eagerness. "Can I have the Addcocks?" Bess and the pessimistic Mrs. Addcock had got together over some medicine to prevent pip in the conservatory young Leghorns.

"Yes, and Matthew can take all the eight Spains if I can sit down Mrs. Spain to a bolt of gingham in time to get them all nicely covered for such a company," decreed the general, as she ran over in her mind's eye the rest of the population of Riverfield. "I'll make all the men hitch their best teams to the different rigs, and by starting early and taking both dinner and supper on the way we can get there in plenty of time. Twenty miles is not more than a half day's trip."

"I can sit by you and hold two Spains in my lap," I heard Polly plan with Matthew.

"Sure you can," he answered her. "I think the loveliest thing about Matthew Berry is the way he speaks to women and children." As he answered, he piled Aunt Mary and Polly in beside the rest of the wheat-bags and motored them away down the avenue.

"Ann, please come to town with me," pleaded Bess as she got into her car and prepared to follow in the wake of the wheat-bags. "I miss you so, and Belle weeps at the mention of you. She and I are having dinner at the Old Hickory Club with Houston Jeffries and Owen to-night. Matt will come, and let's have one good old time. I came all this way to get you."

"I honestly, honestly can't, Bess," I said as I took her hand stretched down from her seat behind the wheel to me, and put my cheek against it. "I've got this whole farm to feed between now and night. Both incubators must have their supper of oil or you know what'll happen. Mrs. Ewe and family must be fed, or rather she must be fed so as to pass it along at about breakfast time, I should say, not being wise in biology or natural history; the entire Bird family are invited to supper with me, and I even have to carry a repast of corn over the meadows to my pet abhorrences, Rufus' swine, because he has retired to the hay-loft with a flannel rag around his head, which means I have offended him or that father has given him an extra absent-minded drink from the decanter that Matthew brought him. Peckerwood Pup is at this moment, you see, chewing the strings out of my shoes as an appetizer for her supper. How could I eat sweetbreads and truffle, which I know Owen has already ordered, when I knew that more than a hundred small children were at home crying for bread?"

"Ann, what is it that makes you so perfectly radiantly beautiful in that faded linen smock and old corduroy skirt? Of course, you always were beautiful, but now you look like—like—well, I don't know whether it is a song I have heard or a picture I have seen." Bess leaned down and laid her cheek against mine for a second.

"I'm going to tell you some day before long," I whispered as I kissed the corner of her lips. "Now do take the twin fathers for a little spin up the road and make them walk back from the gate. They have been suffering with the Trojan warriors all day, and I know they must have exercise. Uncle Cradd walks down for the mail each day, but father remains stationary. Your method with them is perfect. Go take them while I supper and bed down the farm."

"I know now the picture is by Tintoretto, and it's some place in Rome," Bess called back over her shoulder as she drove her car slowly around to the front door to begin her conquest and deportation of my precious ancients.

"Not painted by Tintoretto, but by the pagan Pan," I said to myself as I turned into the barn door.



CHAPTER IX

When I came out with a bucket of the new wheat in my hand, I heard Bess and her car departing, with Uncle Cradd's sonorous speech mingling with the puff of the engine.

"We are all alone, Mr. G. Bird, and we love it, because then we can talk comfortably about our Mr. Adam," I said to the Golden Bird as he followed me around the side of the barn where a door had been cut by Pan himself to make an entry into my improvised chicken-house.

Suddenly I was answered by a very interesting chuckling and clucking, and I turned to see what had disengaged the attention of Mr. G. Bird from me and my feed-bucket. The sight that met my eyes lifted the shadow that had lain between the Golden Bird and me since the morning I had taken him in to see his newly arrived progeny and had not been able to make him notice their existence. Stretching out behind me was a trail of wheat that had dripped from a hole in the side of the bucket, and along the sides of it the paternal Bird was marshaling his reliable foster-mother, Mrs. Red Ally's and all his own fluffy white progeny. With exceeding generosity he was not eating a grain himself, but scratching and chortling encouragingly.

"I knew you were not like other chicken men, Mr. G. Bird, 'male indifferent to hatches,' as the book said," I exclaimed as he caught up with me and began to peck the grains I offered from my hand. "You are just like Owen and Matthew and Mr. Tillett and—and—" but I didn't continue the conversation because the chant began rending my heartstrings again. "Oh, Mr. G. Bird, it is an awful thing for a woman to have an apple orchard and lilac bushes in bloom when she is alone," I sighed instead, as I went on to my round of feeding, very hungry myself for—a pot of herbs. Later I, too, was fed.

Long after the twin fathers had had supper and were settled safely by their candles, which were beacons that led them back into past ages, I sat by myself on the front doorstep in the perfumed darkness that was only faintly lit by stars that seemed so near the earth that they were like flowers of light blossoming on the twigs of the roof elms. In a lovely dream I had just gone into the arms of Pan when I heard out beyond the orchard a soft moo of a cow, and with it came a weak little calf echo.

"Somebody's cow has strayed—I wish she belonged to me and could help me with this nutrition job," I said to myself as I rose and ran down under the branches of the gnarled old apple-trees, which sifted down perfumed blow upon my head as I ran. Then I stopped and listened again. Over the old stone wall that separated the orchard from the pasture I heard footsteps and soft panting, also a weak little cow-baby protest of fatigue.