It was always a secret joy to the girls to hear the way Shad would roll out about the Greenacre "stock."
"Just as if," Jean said, "we had all the cattle upon a thousand hills and racers and thoroughbreds into the bargain, instead of Bonnibel and Lady Bountiful, with Princess and the hens. I think Helen put him up to it. She always thinks in royal terms of affluence."
CHAPTER III
KIT RISES TO PROPHESY
The morning after the fire found the family at breakfast over with the Judge's family. It was impossible as yet for the girls to feel the full reaction over their loss. As the Judge remarked, youth responds to change and variety quicker than any new interest, and they were already planning a wonderful reconstruction period. Kit and Billy rode down on horseback to look at the ruins, and came back with an encouraging report. The back of the house was badly damaged, but the main building stood intact, though the charred clapboards and wide vacant windows looked desolate enough.
"Thank goodness the wind was from the south, and blew the flames away from the pines," said Kit, dropping into her chair, hungrily. "Doesn't it seem good to get some of Cousin Roxy's huckleberry pancakes again, girls? Oh yes, we met my prisoner—I should say, my erstwhile prisoner—on the road. He was tapping chestnut trees over on Peck's Hill like a woodpecker. You needn't laugh, Doris, 'cause Billie saw him too, didn't you, Bill? And he's got a sweet forgiving nature. He doffed his hat to me and I smiled back just as though I'd never caught him in our berry patch, and had Shad lock him up in the corn-crib."
"Was he heading this way?" the Judge asked. "I want him to look at my peach trees and tell me what in tunket ails them."
"Why, Judge, I'm surprised at you, and before the children, too." Cousin Roxy's eyes twinkled with mirth at having caught the Judge in a lapse.
"I only said tunket, Roxy," he began, but Cousin Roxy cut him short.