Pegeen looked perturbed.
“Miss Moran has pictures of them,” she said doubtfully. “They aren’t anything but heads and wings.”
“That’s the painters’ fault. They couldn’t imagine anything as beautiful as a cherub so they gave up before they got fairly started.” The small girl on the doorstep nodded understanding and relief.
“You need legs and hands if you’re going to do much,” she said, “and if I don’t set mine going you won’t have any supper.”
Wiggles and Spunky improved so rapidly under expert treatment that bandages and boric acid were speedily put aside and the two new members of the household were promoted from obscurity to family intimacy.
A crow with an injured wing, and a squirrel rescued at the eleventh hour from Wiggles, and two fluffy yellow chickens whose hysterical mother had tramped on them during a panic over a temporary scarcity of worms, were at various times added to the family group, but the crow and the chickens and the squirrel were merely transients. Once repaired, they went back to the wild life and Mrs. Neal’s chicken yard, though Peterkin, the crow, came back occasionally to sit on the birch tree by the kitchen door and caw at Peg; and Jabberwok, the squirrel, had a nest in a near-by oak from which he threw acorns at Wiggles with unerring aim.
Boots was a transient too, but he did not need bandaging or doctoring and he stayed on as a day boarder for a long time.
Archibald almost stumbled over him one day as he came through the woodshed after an early morning fishing excursion with Jimmy Dawes. He had brought Jimmy home to breakfast and then came in the back way, triumphantly waving creditable strings of trout.
A gurgle of appreciation sounded at Archibald’s feet and he stepped back, hastily looking down into the round staring eyes of a fat baby who sat comfortably strapped into a pine box and held out chubby hands toward the shining fish.
“Well, I’ll be—” began the man. Then he remembered Jimmy, and left the remark hanging in the air unfinished.