The Golden Bird

by Maria Thompson Daviess

The man's name is Adam.

"Now give me a cracker and watch 'em come," he said, as he came close to my side and took a biscuit from my surprised and nerveless hand. "Ah, but you are one beauty, aren't you?" he further remarked, and I was not positively sure whether he meant me or the Golden Bird until I saw that he had reached down and was stroking Mr. G. Bird with a delighted hand. "Chick, chick, chick!" he commanded, with a note that was not at all unlike the commanding one the Sultan had used a few minutes past, only more so, and in less than two seconds all those foolish hens were scrambling around our feet. In fact, the command in his voice had been so forcible that I myself had moved several feet nearer to him until I, too, was in the center of my scrambling, clucking Bird venture.

I don't like beautiful men. I never did. I think that a woman ought to have all the beauty there is, and I feel that a man who has any is in some way dishonest, but I never before saw anything like that person who had come out of the woods to the rescue of my family fortune, and I simply stared at him as he stood with a fluff of seething white wings around his feet and towered against the green gray of an old tree that hung over the side of the road. He was tall and broad, but lithe and lovely like some kind of a woods thing, and heavy hair of the same brilliant burnished red that I had seen upon the back of a prize Rhode Island Red in the lovely water-color plates in my chicken book,—which had tempted me to buy "red" until I had read about the triumphs of the Leghorn "whites,"—waved close to his head, only ruffling just over his ears enough to hide the tips of them. His eyes were set so far back under their dark, heavy, red eyebrows that they seemed night-blue with their long black fringe of lashes. His face was square and strong and gentle, and the collar of his gray flannel shirt was open so that I could see that his head was set on his wide shoulders with lines like an old Greek masterpiece. Gray corduroy trousers were strapped around his waist by a wide belt made of some kind of raw-looking leather that was held together by two leather lacings, while on his feet were a kind of sandal shoes that appeared to be made of the same leather. He must have constructed both belt and shoes himself, and he hadn't any hat at all upon his crimson-gold thatch of hair. I looked at him so long that I had to look away, and then when I did I looked right back at him because I couldn't believe that he was true.

"Now I'm going to pick them up gently, two at a time, tie their feet together with a piece of this string, and hand them to you to put inside the carriage. I'll catch the cock first, the handsome old sport," and as Pan spoke, he began to suit his actions to his words with amazing tact and skill. I shall always be glad that the first chicken I ever held in my arms was put into them gently by that woods man, and that it was the Golden Bird himself. "Put him in and shut the door, and he'll calm the ladies as you bring them to him," he commanded as he bent down and lifted two of the Bird brides and began to tie their feet together with a piece of cord he had taken from a deep pocket in the gray trousers.

"Oh, thank you," I said with a depth of gratitude in my voice that I did not know I possessed. "You are the most wonderful man I ever saw—I mean that I ever saw with chickens," I said, ending the remark in an agony of embarrassment. "I don't know much about them. I mean chickens," I hastened to add, and made matters worse.

"Oh, they are easy, when you get to know 'em, chickens—or men," he said kindly, without a spark in his eyes back of their black bushes. "Are they yours?"

"They are all the property I have got in the world," I answered as I clasped the last pair of biddies to my breast, for while we had been holding our primitive conversation, I had been obeying his directions and loading the Birds into Grandmother Craddock's stately equipage. Anxiety shone from my eyes into his sympathetic ones.

"Well, you'll be an heiress in no time with them to start you, with 'good management.' I never saw a finer lot," he said, as he walked to the door of the carriage with me, with the last pair of white Leghorn ladies in his arms.

"But maybe I haven't got that management," I faltered, with my anxiety getting tearful in my words.

"Oh, you'll learn," he said, with such heavenly soothing in his voice that I almost reached out my hands and clung to him as he settled the fussing poultry in the bottom of the carriage in such a way as to leave room for my feet among them. Mr. G. Bird was perched on the seat at my side and was craning his neck down and soothingly scolding his family. "How are you, Mr. Craddock?" Pan asked of Uncle Cradd's back, and by his question interrupted an argument that sounded, from the Greek phrases flying, like a battle on the walls of Troy.