"I'm getting to have good times; they treat me 'most as if I was other folks," she said to herself, happily. She would have liked to tell her mother about the good time, but her father had come home. She heard his querulous voice, and knew that he had been drinking just enough to make it unsafe to disturb him; so she crept softly up to her room—a cold and bare nook under the eaves. She pulled off her ravelled mitten and gazed at it ruefully. "That was an awful queer thing to do!" she said to herself aloud. "And, my! wa'n't it cold in that barn? But nobody saw me—not a soul! Nobody will ever know! The worst of it is, if I had been ketched, then nobody would ever believe that Alf wasn't a thief! An awful queer thing!" For a minute or two Tilly was lost in painful and perplexing reflection. Then she suddenly shook her fist fiercely at her small, crooked reflection in the cracked piece of looking-glass upon the wall. "Tilly Coombs, don't you never darst to think, as long as you live, that anything she did was queer!" she said, in an impressive whisper that echoed from all the empty corners of the dreary little room. And then Tilly tucked a ravelled mitten under the ragged ticking of her bed, and slept in peace.
While she slept, in the great farm-house at the top of Butternut Hill they were still debating whether she should be arrested at once for the theft of the spoons, or whether Patty should try to influence her to confession and the restoration of the property.
It was Aunt Eunice who suggested the latter course. Uncle Reuben believed in stern justice. He said that the Coombs family was a disgrace to the town; the father was drunken and good for nothing, and the son— His voice broke there; he had always felt that Alf Coombs was to blame for Dave's running away.
"We never heard anything really bad about Alf Coombs until—until he ran away," Anson insisted. Aunt Eunice said she thought Mrs. Coombs seemed like a good woman; and Patty tried to defend Tilly, although it was difficult to explain her knitting up that ravelled mitten! She said Ruby Nutting wouldn't believe anything against Tilly, and you couldn't make her. But Uncle Reuben shook his head over that, and said he was afraid Ruby Nutting wasn't very sensible, and Ruby's father seemed to pity bad folks just as much as good ones, and to take just as much comfort doctoring them—without any pay.
But it was finally decided that Patty should tell Tilly of the proof of her guilt that had been discovered. If Patty failed to influence her, then Aunt Eunice would no longer object to her arrest.
Patty lay awake a long time that night, dreading her mission; she wished she might ask Ruby Nutting to help her, but Uncle Reuben thought it best that no one should be told. When she did sleep she dreamed a dreadful dream, in which Tilly Coombs was being pursued down the long hill, through the great snow-drifts, by an army of spoons with grotesque faces, their mouths made of the initial letter that marked the stolen spoons—O for Oliver, Grandma Barclay's maiden name; they were driving Tilly into the mill-pond, which was open as if it were summer, in spite of the January drifts, and Patty awoke with a start and a cry. But bad as was the fantastic dream, Patty said to herself that the reality was worse.
When Pelatiah opened the back door the next morning, a fine pair of chickens plucked and dressed hung upon the knob. That circumstance seemed mysterious. Why should a thief who would steal a dozen spoons have a weak conscience in the matter of a pair of chickens? Where could Tilly Coombs get a pair of chickens? Patty added these mysteries to the one about the ravelled mitten upon which Tilly had knit and knit and yet worn it unmended, and felt as bewildered as she did when Anson made her listen to something out of the rebus corner of the Butternut Weekly Voice. But Uncle Reuben still insisted that it was a clear case; the thief had restored the chickens in order to stifle suspicion about the spoons. As to how the thief became possessed of the chickens, he "didn't think it would trouble Coombses to rob hen-roosts."
So as Patty set out to accuse Tilly of the theft the little spark of hope which the deepened mystery had aroused in her was almost quenched.
Tilly came to the door, and Patty tried to look at her with judicial severity, as she had seen Uncle Reuben look at offenders, but she broke down suddenly at sight of Tilly's beaming, friendly face.
"Oh, Tilly," she cried, "you will give them back, won't you? It was such a dreadful thing to do! But no one shall ever know; Uncle Reuben says so, if you will only give them back."