“You talk as ef you hadn’t looked fer me?” grinned Sam, endeavoring to free himself from the close embrace.
“I’m that glad to see yoh, Chile! I felt sort o’ fearsome ’bout leavin’ yoh all alone in a wicked city widdout me near to advise yoh dis summer,” returned Rachel, beaming joyously upon her kin.
Sam laughed, and then the story of Grip was told in a most graphic manner, the girls interrupting to add some forgotten item.
“Laws’ee! Ain’t dat a plain case o’ Providence fer us? An’ to think how Natalie called the dawg Grit, too!”
“Now that all this excitement is ended, suppose you business girls go and attend to your work,” suggested Mrs. James. “While you were away I walked over to the vegetable garden and was horrified to find so many weeds growing taller than the plants we are trying to coax along. And Janet’s investment has escaped from the pen and given Rachel and me the race of our lives. After half an hour’s heated chase we captured the pigs, but the chickens are still at large, scratching Norma’s flower slips out of the ground. I have shouted at them, and driven them away repeatedly, but I see they are back there again.”
No more needed to be said then, and in a minute’s time three excited girls were wildly racing to their various places of work to repair the damages made in their investments.
Then Sam was shown his room in the attic, where he could unpack his fabrikoid suit-case and don his farm-clothes. It was plainly evident that he liked the idea of living in the country and driving a car when called upon, and Mrs. James considered the girls were most fortunate to have Rachel’s own relative—to say nothing of the dog—on the place that summer.
Mr. Ames drove by before noon and left the crate with the guinea-hens and pigeons, and Janet eagerly began work on a separate coop for the hens. Sam offered to help build the pigeon-coop on the gable end of the carriage-house, where the birds could alight without molestation.
But the story of Janet’s stock-farm and how she succeeded is told in another book and can be given no extra room in this story. Suffice it to say, she certainly had troubles of her own in trying to raise a barnyard full of different domestic animals; and had it not been for Sam’s ever-willing help in catching the runaways or repairing the demolished fences, the result would not have been quite so good.
That evening, as they all sat on the side steps of the piazza watching the far-reaching fingers of red that shot up from the western sky, Belle spoke plaintively: