"They are still taking things out, talking them over and putting them right back in the same place," answered Rose Mary with a faint echo of his smile that tried to come to the surface bravely but had a struggle. "We will have to try and move the furniture with it all packed away as it is. It is just across the Road and I know everybody will want to help me disturb their things as little as possible. Oh, Uncle Tucker, it's almost worth the—the pain
to see everybody planning and working for us as they are doing. Friends are like those tall pink hollyhocks that go along and bloom single on a stalk until something happens to make them all flower out double like peonies. And that reminds me, Aunt Viney says be sure and save some of the dry jack-bean seed from last year you had out here in the seed press for—"
"Say, Rose Mamie, say, what you think we found up on top of Mr. Crabtree's bedpost what Mis' Rucker were a-sweeping down with a broom?" and the General's face fairly beamed with excitement as he stood dancing in the barn door. Tobe stood close behind him and small Peggy and Jennie pressed close to Rose Mary's side, eager but not daring to hasten Stonie's dramatic way of making Rose Mary guess the news they were all so impatient to impart to her.
"Oh, what? Tell me quick, Stonie," pleaded Rose Mary with the eagerness she knew would be expected of her. Even in her darkest hours
Rose Mary's sun had shone on the General with its usual radiance of adoration and he had not been permitted to feel the tragedy of the upheaval, but encouraged to enjoy to the utmost all its small excitements. In fact the move over to the store had appealed to a fast budding business instinct in the General and he had seen himself soon promoted to the weighing out of sugar, wrapping up bundles and delivering them over the counter to any one of the admiring Swarm sent to the store for the purchase of the daily provender.
"It were a tree squirrel and three little just-hatched ones in a bunch," Stonie answered with due dramatic weight at Rose Mary's plea. "Mis' Rucker thought it were a rat and jumped on the bed and hollowed for Tobe to ketch it, and Peg and Jennie acted just like her, too, after Tobe and me had ketched that mouse in the barn just last week and tied it to a string and let it run at 'em all day to get 'em used to rats and things just like boys." And the
General cast a look of disappointed scorn at the two pigtailed heads, downcast at this failure of theirs to respond to the General's effort to inoculate their feminine natures with masculine courage.
"I hollered 'fore I knewed what at," answered the abashed Jennie in a very small voice, unconsciously making further display of the force of her hopeless feminine heredity. But Peggy switched her small skirts in an entirely different phase of femininity.
"You never heard me holler," she said in a tone that was skilful admixture of defiance and tentative propitiation.
"'Cause you had your head hid in Jennie's back," answered the General coolly unbeguiled. "Here is the letter we comed to bring you, Rose Mamie, and me and Tobe must go back to help Mis' Rucker some more clean Mr. Crabtree up. I don't reckon she needs Peg and Jennie, but they can come if they want to," with which Stonie and Tobe, the henchman,