“There certainly is,” he said, and I sighed and wished I could sneeze again, which for some reason I did, without even trying to, or looking at the sun, or smelling the gladiolus or anything, and I got a quick hope that maybe I was actually going to get hayfever.
Pop banged the car door shut, after taking out a paper bag which had something in it he’d probably bought somewhere in town. Then he said, “You’ve maybe been working too hard and been sweating, and with the wind blowing, you need a dry shirt. Better come in the house and help your mother and Charlotte Ann and me eat this ice cream,” which I did, our Sunday school teacher helping also, she being the reason Pop had hurried to town to get the ice cream in the first place.
Then Mom told me to go gather the eggs, which I started to do, and ran ker-smack into something very interesting. I was up in our haymow looking for old Bentcomb’s nest for her daily egg, which was always there if she laid one, although sometimes she missed a day.
“Well, what do you know?” I said to myself when I climbed up over the alfalfa to her corner. Old Bentcomb was still on the nest and her pretty bent comb was hanging down over her left eye. She was sitting there like she owned the whole haymow and who was I to be intruding?
“Hi, Old Bentcomb!” I said, “How’re you this afternoon? Got your egg laid yet?”
She didn’t budge, but just squatted down lower with her wings all spread out covering the whole nest.
“Where’s your egg?” I said, and reached out my hand toward her, and “zip-zip-peck,” quick as lightning her sharp bill pecked me on the hand and wrist. She wouldn’t let me get near her without pecking at me, and when I tried to lift her off to see if she’d laid an egg today, she was mad as anything, and complained like she was being mistreated, and gave a saddish disgruntled string of cluck-cluck-clucks at me and at the whole world.
I let her stay and scooted down the ladder and ran ker-whizz to the house, stormed into our back door and said to Mom, “Hey, Mom, Old Bentcomb wants to ‘set’! What’ll we do—break her up or let her set?”
“For land’s sakes,” Mom said to me, “don’t knock the world off its hinges!—What! Old Bentcomb!”
“Actually!” I said, “—up in the haymow!”