But Dorothy would not be comforted, nor even lift her curly head to look upon what she now sadly considered as the price of blood, while Hannah continued to moo distractingly, yet, at the same time managed to chew her cud—the sign of a well-contented bovine mind.
Jim also drew near, a wide, short board in hand and, wholly disgusted with Dorothy's inconsistency, exclaimed:
"Pshaw! If girls don't beat all creation for changin' their minds! Here was you wantin' to be rid of that calf, now cryin' like—most like one yourself. Shucks! Dorothy Chester, where's your good sense at? An' you stand aside, will you? I want to fix Hannah so you won't have to chase her no more."
Now the truth is that Dorothy had listened to the auction with keen interest and no thought of grief till she heard Mr. Barry allude to herself as a "poor little girl with only one calf." Then the springs of self-pity were touched and she would have stopped the sale had she dared or known quite how. That her father approved of it he had told her at its beginning, and so did Jim. These two were the most sensibly practical persons she knew, even more than mother Martha,—where the question of live stock was concerned,—and she ought to be guided by their judgment. Daisy-Jewel had been a trial and expense from the day of his arrival at Skyrie, but—he was her Daisy-Jewel, and she had sold him into bondage—probably, into worse: the hands of a butcher! Thirty-five dollars! It seemed incredible: but thirty-five dollars as the price of a life. How dreadful!
"Stand still, you old misery! Now, then, my Hannah, how do you find yourself?" cried Jim, coolly pushing Dorothy aside and stepping back himself to avoid the twisting and jerking of the cow's horns. "There you be! Plenty of chance to look down on the pasture but none to go skippin' over stun walls!"
Dorothy wiped her eyes, indignant with Jim for his callous want of sympathy in her own grief, and curious about Hannah; who had ceased both mooing and chewing, confused and distracted by the thing which had befallen her.
Jim had simply hung the board he had brought upon Hannah's horns and securely fastened it there, letting it fall forward over her face at an angle which permitted her to see the ground but, as he had declared, would not encourage her search for stone walls to leap. "Easy as fallin' off a log, ain't it?" he demanded of Mr. Winters, who had watched the operation with some amusement and some compassion. "Some folks think it's mean to put boards on 'em, but Mis' Stott she said 'twas better to be mean to critters than to have critters mean to folks. Why, here has Dorothy been runnin' half over the hull farm, catchin' Hannah, when all that time she might have been studyin' her books!"
"Thanks, noble youth! I'm not 'sufferin'' to study in the summer and vacation time," answered Dorothy, who had begun to recover her cheerfulness and now asked the blacksmith, as he extended the money toward her: "What will become of Daisy now?"
"Mrs. Calvert has bought him. He will be kept on the Deerhurst farm, the other side of the mountain, and will grow up, I trust, quite worthy of his pedigree. She owns a fine herd of animals and her stock-farm is one of her chief interests here."
"Than he won't be—be murdered?"