“Well, where can I put them?” asked Jess, realizing that unless Dora was willing to help her she could not hope to get the barrel up the stairs. “I have to have these feathers for Hallowe’en, Dora.”
“Take them out in the barn, to be sure,” said Dora. “Why you and Ward don’t want to play in the barn, beats me. Many a child would be thankful for such a light, clean place to stay in. You can make all the noise you want, too, and do as you please out there. And you’re forever hanging around the house.”
“It’s cold,” said Jess, absently, but her mind was busy with another problem. She had remembered that she needed flour paste.
“If I take the feathers out to the barn, Dora,” she said coaxingly, “how about some flour paste? Let me make some?”
“You’re too hard on the flour barrel,” declared Dora, good-naturedly. “Be off to the barn now and leave your barrel there; then go and get the soap your mother promised me and I’ll have the paste ready for you when you come back.”
Jess was willing, and she rolled the barrel out to the barn. She was glad that Ward was over with Artie Marley, for it gave her an opportunity to make her Hallowe’en costume without an audience. She dumped the feathers on the floor of the barn, not minding in the least that they flew about and lighted, many of them, in her hair and on her blouse and skirt, then rolled the empty barrel back to the Pepper driveway.
Carrie saw her and called to her to wait, but Jess shouted that she was going to the store and ran off quickly. It was not part of her plan to have Carrie’s sharp eyes and Carrie’s quick tongue ferret out her secret.
True to her promise, Dora had a generous basin of flour paste ready for Jess when she came back from the store, and the girl took it gratefully and went out to the barn. She made several trips to the house for things she needed, scissors, newspapers, and a paper of pins were among them, but at last she was evidently equipped, for she stayed in the barn.
“Where’s Jess?” asked Polly and Margy, half an hour later, at the Larue back door.
“Out in the barn—at least, she was a little while ago,” answered Dora. “I haven’t heard a word from her since I made her a bowl of flour paste.”