At first the query was a novelty to me; my thoughts went back to a story which I had once read concerning a horde of robbers on the steppes of Central Asia. In this case, however, the thing referred to was a hoard of early apples. I had gone to the Edwardses on some domestic errand; it was directly after breakfast, and Thomas, who was putting a new tooth in the "loafer rake," had set a fine, mellow "wine-sap," from which he had taken a bite, on the shed sill beside him. "Got a pile of those fellows in my hoard," he remarked, with a boastful wink. "Have you got a hoard down at your house?"
"Tom is always bragging about his hoard," said Catherine, who had come to the kitchen door, to hear any news which I might have to impart. "He thinks nobody can have a hoard but himself."
"She's got one," Tom whispered to me, as Catherine turned away. "She's awful sly about it, for fear I'll find it, and I think I know where it is. I'll bet she has gone to it now," he added, taking another bite; and jumping up, he peeped into the kitchen. "She has" he whispered to me. "Come on, still; don't say a word and we will catch her."
I remember feeling a certain faint sense of repugnance to engaging in a hunt for Catherine's apple preserve; but I followed Tom around the wood-shed, past a corn-crib, and then around to the north side of the barn.
"Now sneak along beside the stone wall here," said Tom. "Keep down. Don't get in sight."
We crawled along in cover of the stone wall and came down opposite the garden and orchard. Tom then peeped stealthily over.
"There she is!" he whispered, "right out there by the Isabella grape trellis; keep still now, she's going back to the house. We'll find her hoard."
We searched about the grape trellis and over the entire garden for ten minutes or more, but found no secret preserve of apples.
As we returned to the wood-shed, Kate came out, smiling disdainfully.
"Found it?" she asked us,—a question which I felt to be an embarrassing one. With an air of triumph, she then displayed a fine yellow Sweet Harvey. "Oh, don't you think you are cunning?" muttered Tom. "But I'll find your hoard all the same."