“Of course.”
“Very good. Let me watch this hen for a few minutes and diagnose her. You go on to your other chickens. I’ll stay here and think.”
Dicksie went down through the yards. When she came back, Whispering Smith was sitting on a cracker-box watching the bantam. The chicken was making desperate efforts to get off Dicksie’s cord and join its companions in the runway. Smith was eying the bantam critically when Dicksie rejoined him. “Do you usually,” he asked, looking suddenly up, “have success in setting roosters?”
“Now you are having fun with me again.”
“No, by Heaven! I am not.”
“Have you diagnosed the case?”
“I have, and I have diagnosed it as a case of mistaken identity.”
“Identity?”
“And misapplied energy. Miss Dicksie, you have tied up the wrong bird. This is not a bantam 224 hen at all; this is a bantam rooster. Now that is my judgment. Compare him with the others. Notice how much darker his plumage is––it’s the rooster,” declared Whispering Smith, wiping the perplexity from his brow. “Don’t feel bad, not at all. Cut him loose, Miss Dicksie––don’t hesitate; do it on my responsibility. Now let’s look at the cannibal leghorns––and great Cæsar.”