“This is the Tony Trumbullses' rooster; if I hurry I guess I can carry him back before breakfast,” Rebecca Mary said from the doorway. “I'll run, Aunt Olivia.”
“Carry him back!” Aunt Olivia's muffin spoon dropped into the bowl of creamy batter. One look at Rebecca Mary convinced her that the cure had not begun to work. Imperceptibly she stiffened. “He ain't anybody's but mine. I've bought him,” she explained, briefly. “You set him down and feed him with these crumbs—he ain't human if he don't like cloth-o'-gold cake.”
But the child in the doorway, after gently releasing the great fellow, drew away quietly. The second look at her face convinced Aunt Olivia that the cure would never work.
“You feed him, please, Aunt Olivia,” Rebecca Mary said; “I—couldn't. I'll stir the muffins up.”
Nothing further was ever said about keeping the Tony Trumbull rooster. He pecked about the place in unrestrained freedom until the morning work was done, and then Aunt Olivia carried him home in her apron.
“I concluded not to keep him—he'd likely be homesick,” she said, with a qualm of conscience; for the big, white fellow had certainly shown no signs of homesickness. But she could not explain and reveal the secret places of Rebecca Mary's heart. Aunt Olivia, too, had her ideas of loyalty.
In the diary there occurred brief mention of the episode: “The Tony Trumbull rooster has been here. I could eat him—that's how I feel about the Tony Trumbull rooster.
“I never could have eatten Tomas Jefferson but once and then it would have broken my heart but I was starveing. Aunt Olivia took him back.”
Thomas Jefferson's grave was kept green. Rebecca Mary took her stents down into the orchard and sat beside it, sadly stitching. She kept it heaped with wild flowers and poppies from her own rows. Aunt Olivia's flowers she never touched. The bitterness of Aunt Olivia's not being sorry—perhaps being glad—rankled in her sore little soul. It would have helped—oh yes, it would have helped.
Aunt Olivia worried on. It seemed to her that all Rebecca Mary's meals in one meal would not have kept a kitten alive—and that reminded her. She would try a kitten. The minister's wife had said a rooster or a cat. A white kitten, she decided, though she could scarcely have told why.