One evening when Robin came up into the Straw Parlor he brought something with him. It was a battered old tin coffee-pot.
“What is that for?” asked Meg; for he seemed to carry it as if it was of some value.
“It’s old and rusty, but there are no holes in it,” Robin answered. “I saw it lying in a fence corner, where some one had thrown it—perhaps a tramp. And it put a new thought into my head. It will do to boil eggs in.”
“Eggs!” said Meg.
“There’s nothing much nicer than hard-boiled eggs,” said Robin, “and you can carry them about with you. It just came into my mind that we could take some of our eggs, and go somewhere where no one would be likely to see us, and build a fire of sticks, and boil some eggs, and carry them with us to eat.”
“Robin,” cried Meg, with admiring ecstasy, “I wish I had thought of that!”
“It doesn’t matter which of us thought of it,” said Rob, “it’s all the same.”
So it was decided that when the time came they should boil their supply of eggs very hard, and roll them up in pieces of paper and tuck them away carefully in the one small bag which was to carry all their necessary belongings. These belongings would be very few—just enough to keep them decent and clean, and a brush and comb between them. They used to lie in bed at night, with beating hearts, thinking it all over, sometimes awakening in a cold perspiration from a dreadful dream, in which Aunt Matilda or Jones or some of the hands had discovered their secret and confronted them with it in all its daring. They were so full of it night and day that Meg used to wonder that the people about them did not see it in their faces.
“They are not thinking of us,” said Robin. “They are thinking about crops. I dare say Aunt Matilda would like to see the Agricultural Building, but she couldn’t waste the time to go through the others.”
Oh, what a day it was, what a thrilling, exciting, almost unbearably joyful day, when Robin gathered sticks and dried bits of branches, and piled them in a corner of a field far enough from the house and outbuildings to be quite safe! He did it one noon hour, and as he passed Meg on his way back to his work, he whispered: