“I dunno, pop’s all right if she didn’t put him up to pitch into us.� Tom gives his trousers a jerk, and digs his bare toes into the grass. “An’ she tells him you’re wilful and headstrong as fury.�
Tibby tosses her red-brown curls and purses up her small mouth expressively, then she remembers her quest.
“Just find this toad for me, Tom, and I’ll thank you ever so much, that’s a good boy,� she purrs as she approaches the tree more closely. “I want to see one for myself. Here, I’ll boost you up into the tree. I think it’s out on that limb.�
And the good-natured Tom, declining her proffered aid, climbs the tree with an agility born of long practice, while the girl feels her eyes dilate with expectancy, and then he captures the singer and brings it to her for inspection. Good Tom! Tibby feels these same eyes filling as she looks upon this picture. The toad is a dull gray, and looks incapable of producing these strident sounds. What a queer, homely thing it is. Ugh!
“Put it back upon the limb, Tom. I’m afraid to touch it,� she says with a shiver, and Tom laughs contemptuously.
“You know about as much about toads as Bess does,� he says; “we saw some toad-stools, last night, growing in the moss down on the bank and she said, ‘O, ain’t they pretty, Tom? And to think the toads made ’em, too.’ Ha, ha, ha! she thought the toads made ’em.�
Tibby feels a little lump rise in her throat as she remembers this, and as she turns away her head she sees, as she saw then, a glittering carriage, drawn by a handsome span of bays, come swiftly down the big hill on the east, and watches it with fascinated glance as it spins across the level of the flats and up into the covered, wooden bridge. It comes forth from the nearer end of the structure, and then something happens, for almost before the house the horses come to a halt and the driver springs out. Something has broken. Tibby knows that it must have been caused by that steep pitch off the end of the bridge, which should have been repaired, or filled in, long ago.
“There,� she says to Tom, “if Path-master Morton had attended to that place, this wouldn’t have happened.�
“That comes from putting in politicians that don’t know beans from broomsticks,� says Tom oracularly. “A man that don’t keep his own place in repair can’t be expected to look after the public ones.�
The driver examines the carriage closely, and then comes into the yard and asks for hammer, nails, and other repairing material. Tom runs for the supplies, while Tibby watches a small lady, accompanied by a yellow-haired boy with long curls and kilts, step daintily from the broken carriage and enter the yard. The lady smiles upon Tibby and asks if she may sit down to wait under the shade of the patriarchal old tree; and Tibby replies to her questioning, while she sits before her and tells her of her brothers and sisters, and her heart swells with pride at the lady’s praise of her home and surroundings. Her eyes follow those of the lady to the old-fashioned, weather-brown farm-house, with its low-browed gables and spreading lean-tos, built apparently without regard to economy of ground space; then to the left, where upon a little lower ground the great red-roofed barns and spacious corn-cribs stand, and again to the nodding, smiling flowers dotting the lawn.