“I don’t know why she couldn’t, but it isn’t fair to the calf to make her pay in discomforts just to humor her mistress with the chickens.”
The scouts had stood around listening to this conversation, and now they whispered with Miss Mason. The result was the captain offered to help Janet, not only to get the hens that evening but also to clean out a shed and repair it if necessary, for Susy’s tenancy.
“Then you all must be my guests to supper at the house. I won’t think of keeping you here so late for my affairs and then let you go back to camp and cook your supper. If Rachel can arrange for so many extras, it will be great fun for us all,” said Janet.
Rachel was always glad to have company and she hastily planned. “We kin eat on the side porch where dey is enough room. Sam kin wait on table, and I will cook and serb. Go along, honey, we’ll hab a fine time!”
This important event being satisfactorily settled between Janet, Rachel and the scouts, all hands went to work again and in another hour’s time, the shed was so far completed that Frances was dispatched for the chickens. The goslings had to remain with Ames until their coops were ready on Monday.
When the scouts had completed the remodelled homes for Susy and the cow, they triumphantly left the barn yard, eagerly planning about the gosling’s coop and the pigeon loft they said they would help build for Janet. These tests in carpentry would win each scout the badge she desired.
As the procession reached the house they were surprised to find that Rachel had already milked the cow and was now busy straining the milk. Sue stood quietly waiting at the end of the lane for Sam to show her to her hotel and then give her her supper.
The girls were disappointed that they had not been present at the very first milking of their capital stock asset, but Rachel did not confess that she was not so sure of her old-time cleverness at milking and preferred to experiment without an audience. Now that she found she had not forgotten the knack of milking, she was as eager to show off to the others as they were to see her do the work.
Frances brought home the chickens before supper was ready, and Janet jumped in the car as it came past the side-porch, to accompany Frances and Dorothy to the barnyard. Then the hens and roosters were taken inside the chicken-house and left to seek their roosts for the night. They had been fed before the transference took place, so there was nothing to disturb them again that night.
That supper was a gay one, with scouts sitting on the steps, sitting on boxes, and sitting on the floor of the piazza, eating, drinking and making merry, because all troubles seemed past and the future beamed brightly for them.