There was trouble in chicken circles. The young chicks that the Ethels and Dorothy had helped Dicky move from the incubator to the brooder were making rapid progress toward broiler size, and had been transferred to a run of their own where they scratched and dozed happily through the long spring days. Dicky and Ayleesabet, the Belgian baby, were examining them on a late June afternoon. Dicky had brought with him his old friend, the turtle, which had not yet been moved to Dorothy’s pool, since his present owner wanted to wait until his aunt’s house was occupied before he let so cherished a possession go where he might slip away and his loss, perhaps, be unnoticed.
“When you’re living right there tho you can watch Chrithtopher Columbuth all the time I’ll let you have him,” Dicky had promised Dorothy.
“I see myself in my mind’s eye sitting side of the tank all day and night holding the turtle’s paw!” Dorothy exclaimed when she told the Ethels of Dicky’s decision.
Perhaps because he felt that he was soon to be parted from his old comrade Dicky’s affection for Christopher seemed to increase and he developed a habit of carrying him about, sometimes in his hand and sometimes in a little basket which Dorothy had made for Christopher’s Christmas gift. To-day he had brought him to the chicken yard in his hand and had laid him down on the ground while he examined his flock and called Ayleesabet’s attention to the beauties of this or the other miniature hen.
Elisabeth’s words were few, but she managed to make her wants and opinions known with surprising ease, and she never had the least trouble about expressing her emotions. Her little playmate had learned this and therefore when he heard loud howls behind his back he knew that it was not anger that was disturbing the usually placid baby, but terror. Shriek after shriek arose although it seemed to him that he turned about almost instantly.
He was not in time, however, to prevent her from being thrown down in some mysterious way, or to see the cause of the commotion among the chickens. They fluttered and squawked and ran to and fro, tumbling over each other and running with perfect indifference over the baby as she lay yelling on the ground. Her blue romper legs came up every now and then out of the mass of chicken feathers, and their kicking only added to the disturbance and confusion of the chicks.
The hubbub did not go unnoticed. Roger ran from his vegetable garden to see what was the matter; Helen appeared from her garden of wild flowers; Miss Merriam, the baby’s caretaker, ran from the porch where she was talking with the Ethels who were waiting for the out-of-town members of the U. S. C. to arrive. At the moment when all these people were rushing to the rescue, Margaret and James Hancock, just off the Glen Point street car, hurried from the corner, and Della and Tom Watkins, arrived by the latest train from New York, burst open the gate in their excitement.
To meet all these inquiries came Dicky, tugging after him by the leg, the baby, howling pitifully by this time as she was dragged over the grass. Miss Merriam seized her and hugged her tight.
“What’s the matter with the little darling precious?” she crooned.
Ayleesabet gathered herself together courageously and her sobbing died away.