“How much do you think we’ve made, Joe?” Peggy asked.
“Well, I’ve just been counting it up. The tickets cost a dollar fifty, and Jerry spent a little for wire and stuff for the curtain. But I guess you’ve got, above all that, as much as forty dollars.”
Peggy turned and looked at Lucy Haines. Silently Lucy looked back at her. And without a word on the part of either, it was plain that one had spoken and the other answered.
CHAPTER XVII
A PLAIN TALK
There was trouble in the poultry yard. Whether over-indulgence in a grasshopper diet was accountable, or the responsibility was to be laid at the door of early morning rambles through damp grass, Peggy was not sure, but the condition of the three chickens still under the charge of the yellow hen was plainly alarming. The wretched little creatures hardly had strength to peep, still less to follow their energetic mother on the excursions she showed no intention of relinquishing, out of regard to the health of her family. Peggy found it necessary again to confine her to the small coop she had occupied previously, and the yellow hen indicated her dissatisfaction with the cramped quarters. While she thrust her long neck through the slats and scolded clamorously, her family of three stood about in varying attitudes of dejection, indifferent to the corn-meal mush Peggy spread lavishly before them.
The neighborhood authorities, whom Peggy naturally consulted, pronounced the chickens suffering from “pip” and prescribed weird remedies. Jerry Morton was appealed to along with the rest, and surprised Peggy by professing complete ignorance of the subject.
“I’ve heard my grandmother talk about the pip, but I don’t know what it’s like. I don’t know nothing about chickens anyway.”
“That’s queer,” remarked Peggy musingly, “when you know so much about birds.”
“Oh, birds!” The boy’s face lighted up. “Birds is different. They’ve got their own way of doing things, and one kind ain’t any more like another than folks is. You ought to see a pair of old birds teaching a young one to fly. If he hasn’t got spunk enough to get out of the nest himself, they’ll push him over, and then they’ll fly around him, and keep on talking and talking and saying how easy it is, and show him how. And then when he tries they praise him up, as if he was a perfect wonder, and he begins to think he’s pretty smart himself.” Jerry chuckled, as if recalling such a scene as he was so vividly describing, and Peggy watched him thoughtfully but without speaking. She had learned long before that Jerry was most likely to discuss the subjects nearest his heart when stimulated by silent attention.