"Oh-ho!" giggled Agnes. "Light on a dark subject."
"Who told you, child?" asked Tess, rather doubtfully.
"Holly Pease. And she said that Billy Bumps butted the new minister right through the cellar window—the coal window."
"My goodness!" ejaculated Ruth. "Did it hurt him?"
"They'd just put in their winter's coal, and he went head first into that," said Dot. "So he didn't fall far. But he didn't dare go out of the house again until Sam came home after school and shut Billy up. Holly says Billy Bumps camped right outside the front door and kept the minister a prisoner."
The older girls were convulsed with laughter at this tale, but Ruth repeated: "We might as well go and see him. If he is very savage——"
"Oh, he isn't!" cried Tess and Dot together. "He's just as tame!"
The four sisters started for the yard, but in the big kitchen Mrs. MacCall stopped them. Mrs. MacCall was housekeeper and she mothered the orphaned Kenway girls and seemed much nearer to them than Aunt Sarah Maltby, who sat most of her time in the big front room upstairs, seldom speaking to her nieces.
Mrs. MacCall was buxom, gray-haired—and every hair was martialed just so, and all imprisoned in a cap when the good lady was cooking. She was looking out of one of the rear windows when the girls trooped through.
"For the land sakes!" ejaculated Mrs. MacCall. "What's that goat doing in our yard?"