The squawking of the yellow hen served as an alarm-clock for the late sleepers in Dolittle Cottage the next morning. Peggy who was up, but was loitering over her toilet, in a most un-Peggy-like fashion, scrambled frantically into her clothes and went flying down-stairs. As she threw open the kitchen door, a gaunt dog seated on the top step, greeted her with a courteous waggle, quite as if he were the head of the establishment and bent on doing the honors.
“He wouldn’t let me come no nearer,” said a lanky, grinning individual who stood at a respectful distance, with a basket on either arm. “Looks like he’d adopted you.”
“Yes, it does rather look that way,” returned Peggy, and bestowed an appreciative pat on the dog’s head. It might have been her imagination, but she fancied that a few hours of belonging somewhere, had wrought a marked change in him. If he had been human, she would have said that he seemed more self-respecting. He neither cringed nor cowered, but scrutinized Farmer Cole’s hired man with an alert gravity, as if demanding that he show his credentials.
“Mis’ Cole sent you over this here truck,” Joe explained, “and she says she’ll have Annie bring the bread, after she’s through baking. Where d’you want this hen?”
Peggy led the way to the woodshed, improving the opportunity to sound Joe on the subject of raising chickens. And that unsophisticated youth, who in the beginning of the interview had seemed as painfully conscious of his hands and feet, as if these appendages were brand new, and he had not had time to get accustomed to having them about, lost his embarrassment in view of her evident teachableness, and fairly swamped her with information.
The eighteen eggs for the setting were in a little basket by themselves. Peggy hung over them breathlessly, and saw in fancy eighteen balls of yellow down, teetering on toothpick legs. Then her imagination leaped ahead, and the cream-colored eggs had become eighteen lusty, pin-feathered fowls, worth forty cents a pound in city markets. Peggy’s heart gave a jubilant flutter. Many a fortune had started, she was sure, with less than that basket of eggs.
The work dragged in Dolittle Cottage that morning. It was not that there was so much to do, but there were so many distractions. Peggy’s business enterprise had been the occasion of much animated comment at the breakfast table, and when Peggy mixed some corn meal and carried it out to the woodshed, the girls dropped their various tasks and came flocking after her. The yellow hen was already on her eggs, and she ruffled her feathers in a hostile fashion at the approach of her new owner. Peggy placed her offering conveniently near the nest, raised a warning finger to the chattering girls, as if there had been a baby asleep in the soap-box the yellow hen was occupying, and then tiptoed off, with an air of exaggerated caution.
“You see, she’s very excited and nervous,” Peggy explained, in a subdued voice. “But Joe said she was hungry, and I guess she’ll get off the eggs long enough to eat. Sh! She’s coming now!”
The yellow hen had indeed yielded to the temptation of Peggy’s hasty-pudding. She popped out of the box, gobbled a little of the corn meal, took one or two hasty swallows of water, and then rushed back to her maternal duties. The girls broke into irreverent giggles.
“I shouldn’t call her a beauty,” Ruth declared, as the yellow hen settled down on her eggs, spreading out her feathers till she looked as large as a small turkey.