By dint of warily dropping corn in a trail that led to the barn yard, Janet succeeded in housing all the chickens that night. Then she gave them a generous supper of corn and locked them in the coop.
After Janet had housed the fowl Natalie smilingly glanced over at her gardens. “I guess I’ll run over and see how the greens are coming on,” murmured she, and started off.
Before she had gone very far along the pathway, Janet joined her and described how easy it was to catch chickens! Arm in arm they reached the first garden bed. But the awful cries and subsequent actions from Natalie caused both Rachel and Mrs. James to hasten from the house and fly across the lawn in order to learn the cause of the fearful commotion.
“See! Just look at my beautiful vegetables!” cried Natalie, pointing at the stumps of lettuce plants minus their blades of green, and those tender shoots dug out and wilted, beside the piled up heaps of soil.
Mrs. James and Rachel exchanged looks and frowned at Janet who had a suspicion of the truth. But Natalie never dreamed it might have been the chickens. She fumed and shook a fist at the woodland where a flock of crows could be heard cawing—cawing!
“I’ll rig up the most frightful scarecrow tonight and place it out in this lovely garden of mine; then let one of those black thieves dare to come again! They’ll see!” was the garden scout’s threat as she sent another malignant look over her shoulder at the tall tree where the crows laughed at her.
CHAPTER III
TRIALS OF A STOCK-FARMER
“You neglected little diary,” wrote Janet that night before jumping into bed. “I must say a word to you to let you know why I have not written to-day. Those noisy pigs, and the dreadful chickens kept me too busy for anything. I say ‘dreadful chickens’ advisedly, for they scratched up poor Nat’s little garden greens and left the vegetables in such a condition that I shall have to get up an hour before sun-up in the morning in order to help her replant the slips that were dug out of the soil. Rachel assured us that they would be all right again, in a day or two, if they were planted before the warm sun shone to wilt them. But Nat will have to place inverted flower pots over them during the heat of the day until they are fresh again. If she knew it was the fowl that did it what would she not do to me and to them!
“Oh, I almost forgot to say here, that Rachel when she ran at Nat’s awful yelling, to see what had happened, forgot she had left the potatoes boiling on the fire. When we came back to the kitchen door we saw smoke coming from it that would have made the scouts envious. Such a signal for trouble! No scout could ever have succeeded in warning others in such a distinct way that simply said, ‘Supper burning—come to rescue!’
“Phew! the whole house was filled with smoke. If you’ve ever burned potatoes to a cinder, you’ll know what it smelled like.”