I was called upon to keep my promise in less than a week. It might have been a tragedy if Bess Rutherford's practical sense had not helped save my affections from a panic. This is how it happened.
"Yes, chicken culture is a germ that spreads by contagion. I'm not at all surprised at your friends," Adam had answered when I had appealed to him to know if I could sell Bess Rutherford just six of the baby chicks, when they came out, for her to begin a brood in a new back-yard system, only Bess is so progressive that she is having a nice big place in the conservatory that opens out of her living-room cleared for them to run about out of their tin mother when they want to. She says she believes eternal vigilance is the price of success with poultry as the book she bought, which is different from mine, says, and Bess decided that she wanted her chickens where she could go in to see them comfortably when she came from parties and things without having to go around in the back yard, which is the most lovely garden in Hayesville anyway, in her slippers and party clothes. "I'd sell her the chicks at twenty dollars apiece, and that's cheap if they produce as they ought to with their blood and such—such care as she intends to bestow on them. The twenty-dollar price will either cure her or start an idle woman into a producer," said Adam, in answer to my request, as he cut me out a pair of shoes from a piece of hide like that which the shoes upon his own feet were made from. It was raining, and I sat at his feet in the barn and laboriously sewed what he had cut.
I told Bess what Adam said, and she paid me the hundred and twenty dollars right on the spot, and then insisted on opening the incubator at the regular time for the ten minutes the book directs, to cool off the eggs night and morning, and putting her monogram on six of the eggs. To do this she decided to stay all night, and telephoned her maid, Annette, to pack her bag and let Matthew bring it out to her when he came to help Polly Corn-tassel put their first batch of eggs into their incubator. Matthew had bought twenty hens and two nice brotherly roosters, and they had almost caught up with me in the number of their brown babies on the whole shells. Matthew had been coming out night and morning ever since he had brought out his and the Beesleys' poultry and had either had supper with us at Elmnest or we had both got riz biscuits and peach preserves and chicken fried with Aunt Mary and Uncle Silas and Polly and Bud. I had subjugated Rufus into cooking a few canned things, for which I had traded one of his pig jaws at the bank-post-office-grocery emporium, and Uncle Silas had thrown in a few potatoes, and Adam had brought me a great bag of white beans from across Paradise Ridge, so the diet at Elmnest had changed slightly. The absorbed twins had never noticed it at all; only they displayed more hearty vigor in attacking the problems of literature and history that absorbed them. Also almost every day Pan brought me young green things that were sprouting in the woods, and I cooked them for him in an old iron pot down by the spring-house and had supper with him.
"Those two dears are the most precious old Rips I ever beheld," said Bess when we had retired to my room after supper on the fateful night of our near tragedy. "You are so fortunate, Ann, to have two delicious fathers in name only. Mine pokes into my business at all angles and insists on so much attention from me that I don't know how I'll amount to anything in this world. He says it takes a very fine and brainy woman to earn about ten thousand dollars a year being affectionate and agreeable to her own father, and that I get so much because there is no possible competition as I am an only child, but all the same it looks like unearned money to me. Just wait until those six little chickens begin to earn me a hundred dollars a month like my book guarantees they will do in their second year; then I'm going to show dad just how much I love him for himself and give him back my bank-book."
"Still it is an awful lot of work, Bess," I remonstrated feebly, because I knew that I couldn't have made myself believe all I had learned in just two months at Elmnest the day I started in business.
"You know, Ann, I told you about that wonderful Evan Baldwin who has been in Hayesville two or three times this winter, the man to whom the governor gave the portfolio of agriculture, I believe they call it. Well, he was at the Old Hickory ball the other night when you wouldn't come, and I told him all about you and about buying those little chickens from you, and he was so wonderful and sympathetic that Owen Murray sulked dreadfully. He encouraged me entirely and told me a lot of things about some of his experiment stations in all the different States. You thought you were going to stagger me with that twenty-dollar price on those chicks in shell, but he said he had paid as much as five hundred dollars apiece for a few eggs he got from some prize chickens in England and had brought them over in a basket in his own hand. He said he thought from what I told him about the Golden Bird that twenty would be about right for one of his sons or daughters. Ann, he is a perfectly delicious man, and you must meet him. It is awful the way all the girls and women just follow him in droves, though I'm sure he doesn't seem to notice us."
"I never want to lay eyes on him, Bess. He has insulted me and I never—" but just here a thought struck me in my solar plexus and crinkled me entirely up. "Oh, Bess, I forgot to fill the lamp in the incubator to-night, and I believe the chicken eggs will be all chilled to death. What will I do? It is near midnight and it's—it's—c—cold."
"Let's get 'em quick and maybe we can resuscitate 'em. Don't you remember about reviving frozen people in that first-aid class we had just after the war broke out and we didn't know whether we were in it or not? Come on, quick!" Bess seized the quilt from the bed and descended into the back yard, clad only in her lingerie for sleeping, a silk robe-de-chambre and satin mules, while I followed, likewise garmented.
"Oh, dear, how cold," wailed Bess as the frosty Spring air poured around us in our flight to the barn.
"Put the quilt around you," I chattered.