She sucked the end of the lead pencil meditatively.
“Dear Mister Fletcher,” she wrote, then paused for ideas. Writing to Uncle Joseph she found was a very different matter from talking to Dick Harding. She was picturing Mr. Fletcher in her mind as a cross between a minister and a tame bear. But Jane had a bulldog grit that carried her over hard places, and she finally achieved a letter.
“I guess you’ll be surprised to hear from me but I want you to know bout Alice. Katy says your too stuck up is why you wont do anything for Alice. But I thought mebbe you didn’t know how bad she wants to go to school. Alice says if she could go to school for two years she could teach and pay you back. She wants to go to school so she can be like other people stead of being a hired girl. Shes an awful nice hired girl. Mother says so and shes prittiern anybody cept Marian. I love her heaps. Alice says mebbe you would lend her the money only she wont ask you cause you weren’t nice to her mother and she got awful hungry sometimes. Please Mister Fletcher let Alice go to school cause she cries when she thinks nobody’s looking. She thought mebbe she could get some money for the cestificuts but Mr. Gassett wont do anything.
“Respeckfully,
“Jane Morton.
“P. S. Most everybody calls me Chicken Little. P’r’aps you’d better put it on the letter.
“J. M.”
It took two entire sheets of the pink note paper to hold this communication. Chicken Little opened and shut her cramped hand regarding it with mingled satisfaction and distrust. She had never written so long a letter before. She went back to the beginning and painstakingly dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s, a detail she had omitted in the first writing. She deliberated for some time over the spelling. The lines, too, ran up and down hill in an undignified manner. But Chicken Little with a regretful sigh over these deficiencies, folded the sheets and put them into the tiny envelope, copying carefully the address Dick Harding had written out for her. Then she consigned the precious missive to the depths of her Geography so she wouldn’t forget it on the morrow.
It was duly delivered into Dick Harding’s hands, inspected and approved.
“Bravo, Chicken Little, I couldn’t have done better myself.”