“Very well,” said Winona. “Come on, ladies and gentlemen. We are going to catch a next-door-but-one chicken, and pay the Janeways for him to-morrow.”
“When Puppums caught one last week,” said Florence, appearing suddenly, evidently in full possession of the conversation, “you tied it round his neck!”
She went down under the tubs to extract the wronged animal and sympathize with him on the injustice of life. But only Puppums heard her, for Billy and Winona, hindered by Clay, were careering wildly about after a vociferous, very agile fowl. It was finally captured with a crab-net, and led away to execution by Clay. It appeared that he, also, had had experience in chicken-killing for clergymen. He had often done it, he said, very artistically.
As he and the rooster passed on their way to the scaffold, Winona ran into the kitchen, and out again with a scream.
“It’s Henry!” she said wildly. “It’s Henry! We’ve caught the Janeways’s pet rooster! Clay! Clay!”
“Yas’m!” said Clay, appearing with Henry’s head in one hand and his body in the other. “Dis heah roosteh she certn’ly is good an’ daid! I c’n fix ’em!”
“And they loved him so!” said Winona tragically. “They were telling mother only yesterday how intellectual he was. ‘Not clever, merely,’ Mrs. Janeway said, ‘but really intellectual, my dear Mrs. Merriam!’”
Billy clutched the tubs in order to laugh better, and Louise sat down just where she was, on the floor.
“What’s the matter?” called Tom, running downstairs very clean and tidy.
“Winona’s murdered the Janeways’s intellectual rooster!” explained Billy; and lay back on the tubs again.