“It will be easy enough to slip out when everybody is asleep,” Lucia replied to Rebecca’s question. “We can meet at Mr. Foster’s shop. If I get there first I will wait, and if you get there before me you must wait. As near ten o’clock as we can. And then it won’t take us but a few minutes to push the sapling out into the current. Just think, Rebby, we will save the town, and nobody will ever know it but just us two.”
Rebby sighed. She wished that Lucia’s father had kept the secret to himself. Besides, she was not sure that it was right to prevent the liberty pole from being set up. But that the town should be fired upon by a British man-of-war, and everyone killed, as Lucia assured her, when it could be prevented by her pushing a pine sapling into the current of the river, made the little girl decide that she would do as Lucia had planned.
“All right. I will be there, at the blacksmith shop, when it strikes ten to-night,” she agreed, and the friends parted.
Rebecca walked slowly toward home, forgetting all the joy of the afternoon; forgetting even that it was her fourteenth birthday, and that a string of gold beads for her was probably on board the Polly.
Paul Foster towed the fine sapling to the very place that Lucia had mentioned, and his father came to the shore and looked at it admiringly as he helped Paul make it secure. “It is safely fastened and no harm can come to it,” Mr. Foster said after they had drawn the tree partly from the water. Paul drew his canoe up on the beach, and taking the rabbits in the stout canvas bag, started for home.
Anna and Luretta were both on the watch for him, and came running to meet him. Anna now wore her every-day dress of gingham, and in her eagerness to see the rabbits she had quite forgotten to try and behave like Melvina Lyon.
“Why, it is a pity to separate the little creatures,” Paul declared, when Luretta told him that she had promised one to Anna. “See how close they keep together. And this box is big enough for them both. And they are so young they must be fed very carefully for a time.”
“I know what we can do,” declared Anna; “my rabbit can live here until he is a little larger, and then my father will make a box for him and I can take him home.”
Paul said that would do very well, and that Anna could come each day and learn how to feed the little creatures, and what they liked best to eat.
“But which one is to be mine? They are exactly alike,” said Anna, a little anxiously. And indeed there was no way of telling the rabbits apart, so Anna and Luretta agreed that when the time came to separate them it would not matter which one Anna chose for her own.