1. Kit Traps a Thief
Kit was on lookout duty, and had been for the past hour and a half. The windows of one of the upstairs bedrooms commanded a view of a large part 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 Craig family that ten-acre lot represented profit in the month of August when huckleberries and blueberries were ripe.
The Craig family were newcomers to the country, newcomers in the eyes of the natives of Elmhurst, Connecticut, for they had moved there a year and a half ago seeking peace and rest for Mr. Craig, who was slowly recovering from a nervous breakdown. The family’s adventures and problems in making their home in the country were told in Jean Craig Grows Up. Jean, eighteen and ambitious for an artist’s career, had spent part of the previous winter studying in a New York art school and her experiences there were described in Jean Craig in New York.
Sixteen-year-old Kit, in whom the spirit of adventure ran high, was watching suspiciously a trim-looking, red-wheeled, black-bodied truck, driven by a strange man, as it pulled up at the pasture bars and stopped. The man took out of the truck not a burlap bag, but a tan leather case and also something else that looked like a large box with a handle on it.
“Camouflage,” said Kit to herself, scornfully. “He’s going to fill them with our berries, and then make believe he’s selling books.”
Downstairs she tore with the news. Her twelve-year-old brother Tommy and his pal Jack Davis, nine, were out in the barn negotiating peace terms with a half-grown calf that they had been trying to tame for days, and which still persisted in butting its head every time they came near it with friendly overtures. Jack, whose mother had died and whose father had not wanted to be bothered with him, had come to live with the Craigs after Jean and Tommy had discovered him in Nantic a few days before Christmas, lost and alone. Tommy had immediately assumed responsibility for Jack and protected and bossed him as if Jack were his special property.
Jean and Doris, who was fourteen, had gone up to Norwich with Mrs. Craig for the day, and Mr. Craig was out in the apple orchard with Philip Weaver, spraying the trees against the attacks of the gypsy moths. At least, Philip held to spraying, but Mr. Craig was anxious to experiment with some of the newer methods advocated by the government.
Kit called her news to Tommy and he and Jack started off after the trespasser, while she went back to telephone Mr. Hicks, the constable. The very last thing she had said to Tommy was to put the vandal in the corncrib and stand guard over him until Mr. Hicks came.
“Don’t you worry one bit, Miss Kit,” the Constable of Elmhurst Township assured her over the phone. “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 Doris 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 to catch the thief.
Inside of a few minutes Tommy and Jack came back hot and red-faced, but filled with the pride of accomplishment.
“We’ve got him,” Tommy said, happily, “safe and sound in the corncrib, and it’s hotter than all get out in there. He can’t escape unless he slips through a crack in the floor. We just caught him as he was bending down right over the bushes, and what do you suppose he tried to tell us, Kit? He said he was looking for caterpillars.” Tommy laughed. “Did you call up Mr. Hicks?”
Kit nodded, looking out at the corncrib. The midsummer sun beat down upon it pitilessly, at the end of the lane behind the bar.
“Gosh, do you suppose he’ll survive, Tommy? I’ll bet it’s a hundred and six inside there.”
“Aw, it’ll do him good,” put in Jack. “Don’t you worry about him. He’s a strong man. It was all Tommy and I could do to keep a good hold on him.”
“Oh, kids,” exclaimed Kit. “I didn’t want you to touch him.”
“How else were we to catch him?” demanded Tommy. “You and your bright ideas. Come on, Jack, let’s go back and stand guard over him.”
Kit watched them leave rather 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 corncrib, she wondered 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 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. She was humming and the sound came through the screen door. Mrs. Gorham was Judge Ellis’s housekeeper and helped out the Craigs occasionally when an extra hand was needed. Now that Judge Ellis had married Becky Craig, Mr. Craig’s cousin who had engineered the family’s move to Woodhow and was always at hand in an emergency, Mrs. Gorham was not needed as much at the Judge’s home. Billie, the Judge’s grandson who was sixteen and Doris’s best friend, completed the Ellis household.
Kit slipped around the drive behind the house out to the hill road. Mr. Hicks would have to come from this direction, and here she sat on the ground at the entrance to the driveway, thinking and waiting.
The minutes passed and still Mr. Hicks failed to appear. If Kit could have visualized his trip, she might have imagined him lingering here and there along the country roads, stopping to tell the news to any neighbor who might be nearby. 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 forty, and Kit’s heart sank when she saw her father strolling leisurely down the orchard path, just as Mr. Hicks hove in sight.
Mr. Weaver limped beside him, smiling contentedly.
“Well, I guess we’ve got ’em licked this time, Tom,” he chuckled. “If there’s a bug or a moth that can stand that 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. Craig replied. “He wrote he expected to be here today without fail.”
“Well, of course you’re entitled to your opinion, Tom,” Mr. Weaver replied, doubtfully. “But I never did set any store at all by these here government boys 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 stood up hastily as Mr. Hicks drove in from the road.
“Hello,” he called out, “How are you, Tom? Howdy, Philip? 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.
“Tommy’s got him right over in the corncrib, Mr. Hicks. I haven’t told Dad yet, because it might worry him. It isn’t anything at all, Dad,” she added, hurriedly. “We have been keeping a watch on the berry patch, and today it was my turn. I just happened to see somebody over there after the berries, so I told Tommy and Jack to go and get him, and I called up Mr. Hicks.”
Mr. Craig shook his head with a little smile. “I’m afraid Kit has been overambitious, Mr. Hicks,” he said. “I don’t know anything about this, but we’ll go over to the corncrib and find out what it’s all about.”
Kit and Evie secured a good vantage point up on the porch while the others skirted around the garden over to the old corncrib where Tommy and Jack stood guard.
“My, I like your place over here,” Evie exclaimed, wistfully. “You’ve got so many flowers. Mom 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 felt that all was not as it should be at the corncrib. She saw Tommy 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 move on the part of the culprit, advanced into the corncrib. Evie drew closer, her little freckled face full of curiosity.
“Isn’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 weaver over at Beacon Hill for selling cider.”
Still Kit had no answer, for over at the corncrib she saw the strangest scene. Out stepped the prisoner as fearlessly and blithely as possible, spoke to her father, and the two of them instantly shook hands, while Tommy, Jack, Mr. Hicks, and Mr. Weaver 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. Tommy 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 laced boots to protect him from briars. He was fair-skinned, but tanned so deeply that his blond, curly hair seemed even lighter. He smiled at Kit, with one foot on the lower step, while Mr. Craig called up, “Kit, my dear, this is Mr. Howard, our fruit expert from Washington, whom I was expecting.”
And Kit nodded, blushing furiously and wishing with all her heart she might have silenced Evie’s audible and disappointed remark, “Didn’t he hook huckleberries after all?”