“Wherever did you find the fine little pig?” she cried. Then she threw up her hands. “Look at the mud on you!” she said.
Then the Twins and Dennis told the story all over again, and Mrs McQueen took the little pig in her apron. “The poor little thing!” she said. “Its heart is beating that hard, you’d think its ribs would burst themselves. I’ll get it some milk right away this minute when once you’ve looked in the yard.”
Mr McQueen and Dennis and the Twins went to the fence. There in the yard were the two geese with the black feathers in their wings! “Faith, and the luck is all with us this day,” said Mr McQueen. “However did you get them back at all?”
“’Twas this way, if you’ll believe me,” said Mrs McQueen. She scratched the little pig’s back with one hand as she talked. “I was just after churning my butter when what should I see looking in the door but that thief of a Tinker with the beard like a rick of hay! Thinks I to myself, sure, my butter will be bewitched and never come at all with the bad luck of a stranger, and he a Tinker, coming in the house!
“But he comes in and gives one plunge to the dasher for luck and to break the spell, and says he, very civil, ‘Would you be wanting to buy any fine geese to-day?’
“My heart was going thumpity-thump, but I says to him, ‘I might look at them, maybe,’ and with that I go to the door, for the sake of getting him out of it, and if there weren’t our own two geese, with the legs of them tied together!”
“The impudence of that!” cried Mr McQueen. “Get along with your tale, woman! Surely you never paid the old thief for your own two geese!”
“Trust me!” replied Mrs McQueen. “I’m coming around to the point of my tale gradual, like an old goat grazing around its tethering stump! I says to him, ‘They look well enough, but I’m wishful to see them standing up on their own two legs. That one looks as if it might be a bit lame, and the cord so tight on it! And meanwhile, will you be having a bit of a drink on this hot day?’
“Then I gave him a sup of milk, in a mug, and with that he thanks me kindly, loosens the cord, and sets the geese up on their legs for me to see. In a minute of time I stood between him and the geese, and ‘Shoo!’ says I to them, and to him I says, ‘Get along with you before I call the man working behind the house to put an end to your thieving entirely!’