“So am I!” said Teddy, rejoicing with his sister. “But how did it get here?”
“Jim must have flown over to our house and picked it up off the box when we ran out to see the auto accident,” answered Janet.
And that is exactly how it had happened. Of course Jim could not talk and tell about it, for he could only pull corks and whistle. But from what is known of crows—how fond they are of bright things—it could easily be guessed what had happened.
Jim, flying away from Mr. Jenk’s house, had seen the glittering locket where Janet had left it for a moment as she and her brothers hurried out to the street. The crow had picked it up and had flown off to the woods with it, as they often do with bright and shining things that take their fancy.
Being a tame crow, Jim had made his nest in a low stump instead of a high tree, and there he had dropped the diamond locket, having really no further use for it. And there it had been all this while. Jim must have liked his new freedom, for he did not fly back to Mr. Jenk’s house, though very likely the lame crow the children once saw was this same Jim.
“Oh, everything is coming out all right!” happily cried Janet, as she looked at the diamond ornament. “I’ve found mother’s locket that I thought I’d lost, and we have Mr. Jenk’s crow.”
“We’ll get ten dollars, too,” laughed Ted.
The man who owned the boat came. He was surprised when he heard the children’s story, and said he often had known crows to fly away with bright things.
“Well, I’ll have three passengers to row back, instead of two,” he said, with a laugh. “Where do you live?” he asked the Curlytops.
“At Mount Major, near the sawmill,” they told him.