‘Nothing will do for these beastly hens, it seems, but the garden,’ says Betty indignantly. ‘Susan, stand there, you—no, there!’—gasping.
‘Oh, they’ve scratched up all the mignonette,’ cries Susan, rushing to the point indicated—an escallonia bush in which three culprit hens are lurking. ‘Were there ever such wretches? And plenty of food in the yard, too! It isn’t as if they were starved. Cush! cush! Bother them! They won’t come out. Have you got a stick, Betty?’
‘Here’s one. I declare I’m out of breath from hunting them. And the cock is the worst of all. I hope I’ll live to see the broth he is made into; not that I’d touch it—it would be too full of all malice and bitterness. Hi! hi!’ with a frantic dab at the hens with her stick beneath the too friendly escallonia—‘there is one of them, Susan; run—run to the gate! She’s going that way. Ah! you’ve got that, any way.’
‘That,’ I regret to say, is a stone directed with unerring aim by Betty, and received by the hen on her shoulder with a shock that makes her bound, not only into the air, but ‘over the garden wall’ and into the yard beyond, with a haste that perhaps she calls undue. And now Susan has routed out the other two, and, with a cackling that would rouse the dead, they rush after their companion towards that spot in the wall that is easiest for the purposes of ingress and egress from the yard to the garden. Susan races after them, ‘shoo-ing’ with all her might, generously supported by Betty and her shower of small stones. So ardent, so bloodthirsty, is the chase, it is matter for wonder that the hens, having once gone through such an encounter, could ever brave it again. But hens are amongst the bravest things living—Amazons in their own line. It is indeed popularly supposed in our neighbourhood that the souls of those defunct termagants have entered into them, and, at all events, there does not rest a doubt now in the minds of Susan and Betty that in half an hour’s time those hens will have returned to the charge, as fresh as ever.
‘We must get a wire netting put up along there,’ says Betty angrily. ‘What’s the good of our planting seeds and roots and things for the amusement of those abominable hens? And why should they think there are more grubs under a picotee than under a common daisy?’
‘I wish there was a netting put up,’ says Susan, who is distinctly flushed. ‘But who’s going to do it? Father won’t. Wiring costs something, and there would be a good bit of it to be put up there’—pointing to the long wall.
‘Maybe Dom would, when he gets his next half-year’s allowance.’
‘I don’t think you ought to ask him,’ says Susan. ‘He is not our brother, you know.’
‘He’s nearly as good,’ says Betty.
‘Still, he isn’t, and I, for one, wouldn’t ask him.’