“But what you’ve seen, you’ve seen,” she said. “I’ve got to see fifty birds before June 1st; that doesn’t necessarily mean see them so you’ll know them again. Now I shouldn’t know the nestle or the shelcuff, but I can put them down, can’t I?”
“Of course,” assented Katherine, “a few rare birds like those will make your list look like something.”
The pink-headed euthuma, which came to light on the very last day of May, interested Mary so much that she told Roberta about it immediately and Roberta questioned the discoverers. Their accounts were perfectly consistent.
“Way out on Paradise path, almost to the end, we met a man dashing around as if he were crazy,” explained Betty. “We should have thought he was an escaped lunatic if we hadn’t seen others like him.”
“Yes,” continued Katherine. “But he acted too much like you to take us in. So we said we were interested in birds too, and he danced around some more and said we had come upon a rare specimen. Then he pointed to the top of an enormous pine-tree—”
“Those rare birds are always in the very tops of trees,” put in Mary eagerly.
“Of course; that’s one reason they’re rare,” went on Betty. “But that minute it flew into the top of a poplar, and we three pursued it. It was a beauty.”
“And then you came back after me, and it was still there. Tell her how it was marked,” suggested Mary. “Perhaps she knows it under some other name.”
“It had a pink head, of course,” said Katherine, “and blue wings.”