“Aren’t they?” added Bess, turning back to get another look at little Nellie in her big-brimmed hat.
“They are surely going to do something desperate,” declared Cora, “and I think now that we have found them, as the boys would say, ‘it is up to us’ to keep track of them.”
[CHAPTER III—THE STRIKE]
“Oh, mercy!” exclaimed Bess, as they neared the shed, “did you ever see such a hateful old woman!”
“Hush!” whispered Belle. “Do you want us to go back to Chelton without our berries?”
“If she ever looks at them they will sour—they couldn’t keep,” went on Bess, recklessly, but in lowered tones.
“We would like two crates of berries,” Cora was saying to the woman, who stood, hands on her hips, framed in the narrow doorway of the sorting shed.
“Yes,” answered the woman. “Step inside and pick ’em out. They are all fresh picked to-day. Rose, don’t you know enough to make room for the young lady?” and the woman glared at the girl who had hurried in from the patch.
“Oh, I have plenty of room,” Cora said with a smile to Rose. “What are those little sticks for?”
“Them’s the tally-sticks,” answered the woman. “They get one for every quart they pick, and then they cash ’em in. Here!” and she snapped a bunch from the trembling hands of the girl who was counting and tying up in bunches the wooden counters, “let me show ’em to the young lady.”