The chickens seconded Jilly’s suggestion, coming to the fence and clucking excitedly.
Jilly looked pained at Dick’s indolence and, taking his hand, led him over to a covered wooden box, which was found to contain shelled corn. The chickens were duly fed, but Dick still puzzled over the unchastized rooster until Marian enlightened him later.
“I shall have to give you a key to Jilly’s dialect,” Marian laughed–“she merely wanted you to go with her to see the chickens.”
125Chicken Little was enjoying her guests. Her resolve to help mother was carried out only semi-occasionally when there were raspberries or currants to be picked or peas to be shelled, under the grape arbor so they wouldn’t be in Annie’s way in the kitchen. At first, Mrs. Morton had counted on having the girls help with the breakfast dishes, but they developed such a genius for disappearing immediately after breakfast that she gave it up as more bother than it was worth.
They tramped and rode, and waded and splashed and finally swam, in the bathing hole down at the creek, under Marian’s or Alice’s supervision, till Katie and Gertie were brown and hearty.
“Mrs. Halford wouldn’t know Gertie–she’s fairly made over,” Alice observed one morning.
Gertie was fast losing her timidity and had so much persistence in learning to ride that she bade fair to have a more graceful seat in the saddle than Jane herself. Sherm was deep in farm work and the girls saw little either of him or of Ernest, except in the evenings and on Sundays. Dick ran the reaper in the harvest field for Dr. Morton for three days, but his zeal waned as the weather got hotter.
“This is my vacation and I don’t want to sweat my sweet self entirely away ‘in little drops of water.’ Think how pained you’d be, dearest,” he told Alice.
“I never dreamed there was so much farming to 126a ranch,” Alice remarked to Dr. Morton one day. “I thought you attended to the cattle—”
“And rode around in chaps and sombreros, looking picturesque, the rest of the time,” interrupted Dick. “My precious wife is disappointed because she hasn’t seen any cowboys cavorting about the place shooting each other up or gambling with nice picturesque bags of gold dust.”