“I didn’t and I’m practically dead on my feet. But I’m so glad that Billie is going to pull through.”
Now that Billie’s recovery was assured everybody’s spirits seemed to become lighter. After two weeks of almost daily showers there had come a spell of close warm weather that dried up the fields and woods, and left them, so Becky said, dry as tinder and twice as dangerous.
Kit and Doris were preparing the garden for planting.
“Oh, dear!” Kit leaned back against the side of the barn and looked lazily off at the widening valley before her. “I’m so afraid that Dad will get too interested in chicken raising and crops and soils and things, so that we’ll stay on here forever. Somehow I didn’t mind it half as much all through the winter, but now that spring is here, it’s just simply awful to have to pitch in and work from the rising of the sun until it goes down. I want to be a lady of leisure.”
Overhead the great fleecy, white clouds sailed up from the south in a squadron of splendor. A new family of bluebirds lately hatched was calling hungrily from a nest in the old cherry tree nearby, and being scolded lustily by a catbird for lack of patience. There was a delicate haze lingering still over the woods and distant fields. The new foliage was out, but hardly enough to make any difference in the landscape’s coloring.
“How’s Billie?” asked Doris suddenly. “I’ll be awfully glad when he’s out again.”
“They’ve got him on the porch bundled up like a mummy. He’s so topply that you can push him over with one finger and Becky treats him as if she had him wadded up in pink cotton. I think if they just stopped treating him like a half-sick person, and just let him do as he pleased he’d get well twice as fast.”
Doris had been gazing up at the sky dreamily. All at once she said, “What a funny cloud that is over there, Kit.”
It hung over a big patch of woods toward the village, a low motionless, pearl-colored cloud, very peculiar looking, and very suspicious, and the odd part about it was that it seemed balanced on a base of cloud, like a huge mushroom or a waterspout in shape.
“What on earth is that?” exclaimed Kit, springing to her feet. “That’s never a cloud, and it’s right over the old Ames place. Do you suppose they’re out burning brush with the woods so dry?”