CHAPTER XIV
THE HEN-WIFE
"When I was a farmer, a farmer's boy, I used to keep my master's chickens..."—NURSERY SONG.
At the close of a day largely devoted to the task concerning Blossom, the cart, and the mangolds, I came up to the farmhouse to get their second feed for Mrs. Price's chickens. Of these she had eighty, and I know she set great store by them. She well might! The hens, I heard, cost ten shillings each; one speckled grey cockerel was a guinea!
Some of the hens with their brood clucked about that midden in the yard to which I'd added by several barrow-loads; the rest were in a field that sloped quite steeply up the hill. I had fed the first lot in the yard; I had ascended the hill to the field with the coops dotted about it, and I had shut a brood of restless, fluffy, "peep"-ing chicks into the coop for them to feed undisturbed by their marauding grown-ups, when suddenly there brushed against my leggings the fluffy white-and-golden coat of Captain Holiday's collie.
"Tock, tock, tock!" called the hens about me. And, above me, I heard the captain's "Good afternoon."
I rose, straightened myself from putting down the wire door of that coop, and turned to face him.
A little shock of surprise met me with the sight of him. He was—different. What had he done to himself? I wondered in a flash—in the same flash I realized that it was merely his clothes.
For the first time since I'd met him Captain Holiday had changed out of his accustomed khaki. He was wearing tweeds. A hat that might have done duty on a scarecrow, with a fishing-cast about it, shaded his eyes from the late afternoon sun. His Norfolk jacket was a shaggy, grey-green disgrace to a gipsy's wardrobe ... but it suited him quite well. I wondered why he had never worn these things before.
After this I found myself thinking that I must have seen him in tweeds before now.