“Yes, I’m goin’ to tell Joe on you, you scamp!” she threatened.
“Coo-doot-cut!” said the rooster, looking about him with a long stretching of the neck.
“Yes, you better begin to cackle over it,” said she, speaking in solemn reproof, as if addressing a child, “for Joe he’ll just about cut your sassy old head clean off! If he don’t do that, he’ll trim down that wing of yourn till you can’t bat a skeeter off your nose with it, you redick-lous old critter!”
But it was not the threat of Joe that had drawn the cry of alarm from the fowl. The sound of steps was growing along the path from the front gate, and the fowl scampered off to the cover of the gooseberry vines, as Mrs. Newbolt turned to see who the visitor was. The scissors fell from her lap, and her spool trundled off across the porch.
“Laws, Sol Greening, you give me a start, sneakin’ up like that!”
Sol laughed out of his whiskers, with a big, loose-rolling sound, and sat on the porch without waiting to be asked.
“I walked up over the grass,” said he. “It’s as soft under your feet as plowed ground. They say Joe’s got one of them lawn-cutters to mow it with?”
“Well, what if he has?” she wanted to know. “He’s got a good many things and improvements around here that you folks that’s lived here for seventy years and more never seen before, I reckon.”
“He sure is a great feller for steppin’ out his own way!” marveled Sol. “I never seen such a change in a place inside of a year as Joe’s made in this one–never in my mortal borned days. It was a lucky day for Joe when Judge Maxwell took a likin’ to him that way.”
Mrs. Newbolt was looking away toward the hills, a dreamy cast in her placid face. 362