Jack, after a few squeaks and barks, joined in a queer trembling treble, and finally the noise penetrated Happy’s brain, deaf though she was, and she added to the din by a tune in a wholly different key.
The effect was as bewildering to Anne and her father as to the soldiers in a procession when they are an equal distance between two bands playing different tunes. At first they laughed, then put their fingers in their ears, called to the dogs and tried to stop the din, for it was being taken up far and near, the shrieks and imitation bays of Pinkie Scott’s fox terriers, who didn’t know how to sing, being particularly piercing. In fact, Miss Jule afterward said that all her dogs responded, and that Mr. Hugh’s hounds and Squire Burley’s kept it up half the night.
Jack and Happy were easily quieted, but Waddles was irrepressible and continued to sing to himself after he went to his sleeping place on the rug outside of Anne’s door, so that long after the household had vainly tried to go to sleep, and Tommy half waking had an argument with his mother, and insisted upon being dressed, saying that he knew it was morning, because he “heard roosters,” Waddles was led out to his house and chained for the night, the severest punishment that he could have.
Anne tried to console him from her window, but as soon as he seemed about to lie down, he began again, and Anne retired in disgust; at her last glimpse of him he was standing motionless with his head raised and facing the moon in musical ecstasy. She did not know, however, that Mamma Owl was mouse hunting in deep shadow along the wall back of the kennel, saying things that no self-respecting dog could hear and keep silence.
The next morning Anne’s first thought was of the owls, and that she must try to find where they had nested. She believed that she and Tommy had explored every tree in the neighbourhood since March when the ice melted. The nest must be somewhere in the orchard, for there was nothing in the owl boxes that were put in the pines several years before.
When she threw open the shutters toward the wooded side of the place, her eye rested on two unusual bumps on the reddish bark of a Scotch pine. She looked again, and even without the aid of her field-glass saw that two of the baby screech-owls had settled for their daytime sleep in the crotches of the pine, their young rusty gray feathers so blending with the bark that it would have been impossible to see them except from the slant of light and the fact that she was on a level with them.
Waddles Baying the Owls.
