It was not very often that Mamie ventured on the Kayuna grounds. She had been warned off too many times, with too many threats of terrible things happening if she went beyond the farm-yard bounds. This morning her errand made her bold.
“Do you hear?” she repeated, in her shrill little voice. “Pa sez he won’t have you in the barnyard any more. I don’t b’lieve he’ll let you in the barn either, ’n’ then you can’t jump on the hay ever again.”
“Well, I like that!” exclaimed Eunice, not very elegantly it must be confessed. “As if it wasn’t, really, our father’s barn.”
“Don’t care. My pa kin boss it, ’n’ he’s goin’ to,” returned Mamie, enjoying her sense of importance, and teasingly keeping back the true reason of the message.
“I’ll make ’em good and angry, first,” she thought, in her usual mischievous spirit. “Pa said you was allers a-junketin’ round. I heerd him,” she said, aloud.
“Well, I’d like to know,” said Cricket, angrily, “what right ’Gustus John has to say what we shall do in those barns. They are my papa’s, and he just hires your father to look after the farm, Mamie Hecker. And papa says we may play in the barns as much as we like, if we don’t ’sturb things, and ’Gustus John says we never ’sturb anything at all. I don’t b’lieve one word of it. Do you, Eunice?”
“No, I don’t. But I think,” said Eunice, very slowly and decidedly, “if you know what’s good for yourself, Mamie, you’ll get off our grounds, just as fast as you can travel, or else—you’ll see!”
“You don’t dast spank me again,” cried Mamie, holding up one knee, while she balanced herself on one foot, “cause your pa told you never to dast do that again. I ’xpect he’d whip you, if you did.”
“Whip me!” replied Eunice, scornfully. “Whippings are for bad little things like you, Mamie; you’d be better if you got a lot more of them.”
The children never stopped to choose their words when they talked to Mamie.