“When I looked for him, to say by-by,” explained Olive, “he wasn’t anywheres at all. So I called at him. And he barked. And I went to where the bark was. And there was poor old Chummie all tied up to a chain in the barn. He was being punished. So I—”
"He wasn’t being punished, dear," said Dorcas, lifting the child to the ground. “Link tied him up so he wouldn’t follow us to town. There are so many autos on the roads Saturday afternoons. Besides, Eben Shunk—”
“Oh,” queried Olive. “Was that why? I thought he was punished. So I unpunished him. I let him loose. Not outdoors. Because maybe you’d see him and tie him again. I let him loose and I shut the barn door, so he could stay in there and play and not be tied.”
"It’d take Chum just about ten minutes to worry the barn door open!" grinned Link. “He’ll get our scent and come pirootin’ straight after us.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Dorcas. “Hadn’t you better turn back and—”
But the hurrying of the child’s father and mother from the house to welcome the newcomers drove the thought out of her mind. Link had but grinned the wider at her troubled suggestion. Greeting his parents-in-law, Ferris hitched his horse and followed Dorcas and her mother to the veranda.
There they sat talking until suddenly a volley of heart-broken screams broke in upon them. Up the path from the street rushed little Olive, her eyes streaming, her baby mouth in a wide circle, from which issued a series of panic cries.
Both men sprang to their feet and hurried down the path to meet her. Her mother and sister rushed from the house at the same moment and ran to succour the screaming child. But Olive thrust them back, squealing frantically to Link:
“That awful man’s got Chummie! He tooked him from me and he says he’ll beat him till he’s dead. I pulled Chummie away and the man slapped me over and he’s running off with Chummie!”
Old Man Chatham was an elder in the church at Hampton. Yet on hearing of the blow administered to his worshipped child and at the sight of an ugly red mark athwart her plump baby face, an expletive crackled luridly from between his pious lips—an expletive which should have brought him before the consistory of his church for rigid discipline.