They consented, but not too eagerly. They loved mamma, course; but they loved chicken, too. It required considerable faith on their part to go way back to the cabin and leave their dinners behind them, expecting to find them just as now.
However they started. Dorcas held the stem of the burdock leaf and Sheba its tip. Being somewhat shorter than her sister, Sheba’s end of the burden slanted downwards. The grass was hummocky. Their steps did not keep time very well. A fragment of Chloe’s well-flavored “stuffin’” slipped down upon Sheba’s fat fingers and—right before she knew it was in her mouth, yes, sir! Right before!
“Oh! Sheba! You’d oughtn’t not to have did that!” reproved Dorcas, severely. Then she stumbled over a brier. She had watched her sister too closely to see where her own feet fell, and one little cluster of grapes rolled to the ground.
“I guess that was ’cause I was lookin’ for ‘the mote in your eyes’ ’t I got a ‘beam’ in mine so’s I couldn’t see right smart,” observed this Scripture-taught child, in keen self-reproach.
“Did you get a beam? I didn’t. I can see real good. Say, Dorcas, ’twouldn’t not do to give mamma grapes what have fell into dirty grass, would it? Mamma hates dirt so much papa laughs hard about it. And—and it isn’t not nice to waste things. Mamma says ‘waste not want not.’ I ain’t wantin’ them grapes but I can’t waste ’em, either. Mamma wouldn’t like that. These ain’t our kind of wild ones, we get in the woods. These are real ones what grew on a vine.”
They paused to regard the fallen fruit. How the sunlight tinted their golden skins. They must taste—Oh! how doo-licious they must taste! As the elder, and therefore in authority, Dorcas stooped to lift the amber fruit; and, losing hold of the burdock leaf sent the whole dinner to the ground.
Then did consternation seize them. This was something dreadful. If mamma hadn’t been so terrible neat! If she’d only been willing to “eat her peck of dirt,” like papa said everybody had to do sometime, they could pick it all up and squeeze it back, nice and tight on the big green leaf, and hurry to her with it. But——
“Yes, sir! There is! A yellow wiggley kittenpillar just crawled out of the way. S’posing he left one his hairs on that chicken? Just suppose? Why, that might make mamma sick if she ate it! You wouldn’t want to make poor darling mamma sick, like the Geraldy boy, would you, Sheba Stillwell? Would you?”
Poor little Sheba couldn’t answer. She was in the throes of a great temptation. She hadn’t the strength of character of Saint Anne. She didn’t at all like that suggestion of a “kittenpillar’s” hair and yet—what was one hair to such a wicked waste as it would be if they left all that fine food to spoil, or for the guinea-hen to gobble.
“The guinea-hen eats a lot. She eats kittenpillars right down whole;” pensively observed Sheba, when she had reached this stage of thought.