“I know what your eggs will look like,” said the chief.
When they turned the bags inside out they found the pies, cake, doughnuts and bread all mashed together. There was blackberry pie making a red streak and lemon custard making a yellow streak, with doughnuts flattened out and loaves of bread between. The juice of the pies had been soaked up by the bread and cake.
“Hey!” said the chief, “What have we here?”
“That,” said Reddy, “is pie-cake-doughnut-bread.”
“It looks it,” said the chief, “but I believe we can eat it.”
So they sat down and ate some; and, sure enough, it was good.
In the meantime the other robbers who had gone out had stolen all the eggs they could find and put them in another cave near by. There were 503 dozen in all. Now it happened that there was a hot spring in one corner of the cave where the eggs were stored and after they had lain there long enough they began to hatch out. One morning when the robbers came out of their cave they heard a great rustling and peeping all over the hillside. There were 5798 peeps moving through the grass and among the trees and crying: “peep! peep!”
“Goodness!” said the robber chief, “look at our eggs! they are hungry.”
That night they stole a feed grinder from a farmer in the valley and several bags of corn. Three robbers shelled corn, three drove the mill, three fed the corn and three made mush of the meal and fed it to the peeps. The other robbers stole the corn and carried it up the mountain. In about two weeks they were tired out. “We are not robbers any longer,” they said, “this is work!” so they all ran away. By this time the peeps had become chicks and begun to eat grasshoppers and crickets and were able to take some care of themselves; but the foxes, weasels, skunks and minks had a fine time eating them as they scattered over the mountain side. Bye and bye the farmers caught them until there were no more left; but the mountain is called Peep-Chick, or something like that, to this day.