Kit of Greenacre Farm

Kit was on lookout duty, and had been for the past hour and a half. The cupola room, with its six windows, commanded a panoramic view of the countryside, and from here she had done sentry duty over the huckleberry patch.

It lay to the northeast of the house, a great, rambling, rocky, ten acre lot that straggled unevenly from the wood road down to the river. To the casual onlooker, it seemed just a patch of underbrush. There were half-grown birches all over it, and now and then a little dwarf spruce tree or cluster of hazel bushes. But to the girls of Greenacres, that ten acre lot represented a treasure trove in the month of August when huckleberries and blueberries were ripe. Shad said knowing the proper time to pick huckleberries was just born in one, so the girls had guarded the old pasture from any marauding youngsters or wayside peddlers.

"You've got to keep a good eye out for them this year," Shad warned them. "Last year wasn't good for huckleberries, apples or nuts, but this is going to be a regular jubilee harvest. Them bushes up there are hanging so full that you can put up quarts and quarts and quarts of them and send huckleberry pies to the heathen all winter if you want to."

And he had likewise warned them that that particular berry patch had been famous throughout the countryside ever since the days when Greenacres had belonged to the Trowbridges. Several times when it had happened to be a good year for the huckleberry crop, raiders had swept down and culled the best of the harvest. Not from around the near-by villages had they come, but from the small towns, ten or fifteen miles away.

"Them mill boys and girls," Shad declared, "just think that the Lord grows things in the country for anybody to come along and pick. They don't pay no more attention to a 'No Trespassing' sign than they would to a woodchuck's tracks. The only thing to do is watch, and when you see 'em turn in through the bars off the main road, you come down and let me know, and telephone over for Hannibal Hicks to come and ketch 'em. Hannibal ain't doin' nothin' to earn his fifteen dollars a year as constable 'round here, and we ought to help him out if we can."

So to-day, it was Kit's turn to watch the huckleberry patch from the cupola room, and along towards three o'clock she beheld a trig-looking red-wheeled, black-bodied wagon, drawn unmistakably by a livery horse, pull up at the pasture bars, and its driver calmly and shamelessly hitch there. He took out of the wagon not a burlap bag, but a tan leather hand bag of generous size, and also something else that looked like a capacious box with a handle to it.

"Camouflage," said Kit to herself, scornfully. "He's going to fill them with our berries, and then make believe he's selling books."

Down-stairs she sped with the news. Doris was out at the barn negotiating peace terms with a half-grown calf that she had been trying to tame for days, and which still persisted in butting its head every time she came near it with friendly overtures. Jean and Helen had gone up to Norwich with Mrs. Robbins for the day, and her father was out in the apple orchard with Philemon Weaver, spraying the trees against the attacks of the gypsy moths. Leastwise, Philemon held to spraying, but Mr. Robbins was anxious to experiment with some of the newer methods advocated by the government.

All unconscious of Kit's intentions or Shad's eagerness to abet them, the two rambled off towards the upland orchards. Kit had started Shad after the trespasser, while she went back to telephone to Mr. Hicks. The very last thing she had said to Shad was to put the vandal in the corn-crib and stand guard over him until Mr. Hicks came.

"Don't you worry one bit, Miss Kit," the constable of Gilead Township assured her over the wire. "I'll be there in my car in less than twenty minutes. You folks ain't the only ones that's suffering this year from fruit thieves, and it's time we taught these high fliers from town that they can't light anywhere they like and pick what they like. I'll take him right down to the judge this afternoon."

Kit sat by the open window and fanned herself with a feeling of triumphant indignation. If Jean or Helen had been home, she knew perfectly well they would have been soft-hearted and lenient, but every berry on every bush was precious to Kit, and she felt that now was the appointed hour, as Cousin Roxy would have said.

Inside of a few minutes, Shad came back, perspiring and red faced, but filled with unholy glee. He dipped a tin bucket into the water pail.

"I've got him," he said, happily, "safe and sound in the corn-crib, and it's hotter than all get out in there. He can't escape unless he slips through a crack in the floor. I just caught him red handed as he was bending down right over the bushes, and what do you suppose he tried to tell me, Miss Kit? He said he was looking for caterpillars." Shad laughed riotously at the recollection. "Did you call up Han Hicks?"

Kit nodded, looking out at the corn-crib. The midsummer sun beat down upon it pitilessly, at the end of the lane behind the barn.

"Do you suppose he'll survive, Shad? I'll bet a cookie it's a hundred and six inside there."

"Do him good," retorted Shad. "Probably it's the only chance he's ever had to meditate on his misdoings. Don't you fret about him. He's just as husky as I be, and twice as hefty. It was all I could do to ketch a good holt on him."

"Oh, Shad," exclaimed Kit. "I didn't want you to touch him, you know."

"I didn't," Shad laughed. "I just gave him a bit of sound scripture reasoning, aided by fist persuasion when he was inclined to put up an argument. I'll stand guard over him until Han comes along, and takes him quietly off our hands. I reckon he didn't think we had any majesty of the law here in Gilead."

Kit looked after his retreating figure somewhat dubiously. It was one thing to act on the impulse of the moment and quite another to face the consequences. Now that the prisoner was safe in the corn-crib, she wondered somewhat uneasily just what her father would say when he found out what she had done to protect the berry patch. But just now he was safe in the upper orchard with old Mr. Weaver, deep in apple culture, and she thought she could get rid of the trespasser before he returned.

Mrs. Gorham was in the kitchen putting up peaches. Her voice came with droning, old-fashioned sweetness through the screen door.

"When I can read my title dear

To mansions in the skies,

I'll bid farewell to every fear,

And wipe my weeping eyes."

Kit slipped around the side drive behind the house out to the hill road. Mr. Hicks would have to come from Gilead Green in this direction, and here she sat on one of the high entrance posts, waiting and cogitating.

The woodbine that clambered over the two high, white posts was still green, but scrambling along the ground were wild blackberry runners just turning a rich brown crimson.

The minutes passed and still Mr. Hicks failed to appear. If Kit could have visualized his journey hither, she might have beheld him, lingering here and there along the country roads, stopping to tell the news to any neighbor who might be working out his road tax in the lull of the season between haying and harvest time. Beside him sat Elvira, his youngest, drinking in every word with tense appreciation of the novelty. It was the first chance Mr. Hicks had had to make an arrest during his term of office, and as a special test and reward of diligence, Elvira had been permitted to come along and behold the climax with her own eyes. But the twenty minutes stretched out into nearly an hour's time and more, and Kit's heart sank when she beheld her father strolling leisurely down the orchard path, just as Mr. Hicks hove in sight.

Mr. Weaver hobbled beside him, smiling contentedly.

"Well, I guess we've got 'em licked this time, Jerry," he chuckled. "If there's a bug or a moth that can stand that leetle dose of mine, I'll eat the whole apple crop myself."

"Still, I'll feel better satisfied when Howard gets here, and gives an expert opinion," Mr. Robbins rejoined. "He wrote he expected to be here to-day without fail."

"Well, of course you're entitled to your opinion, Jerry," Mr. Weaver replied doubtfully. "But I never did set any store at all by these here government chaps with their little satchels and tree doctor books. I'd just as soon walk up to an apple tree and hand it a blue pill or a shin plaster."

Kit slid hastily down from the post as Mr. Hicks' black and white horse turned in from the road.

"Hello," he called out, cheerily. "How be you, Jerry? Howdy, Philemon? Miss Kit here tells me you've been harboring a fruit thief, and you've caught him."

Kit's cheeks were bright red as she laid one hand on her father's shoulder.

"Shad's got him right over in the corn-crib, Mr. Hicks. I haven't told father yet, because it might worry him. It isn't anything at all, Dad," she added, hurriedly. "We girls have been keeping a watch on the berry patch, you know, and to-day it was my turn to stand guard up in the cupola. I just happened to see somebody over there after the berries, so I told Shad to go and get him, and I called up Mr. Hicks."

Mr. Robbins shook his head with a little smile.

"I'm afraid Kit has been overzealous, Hannibal," he said. "I don't know anything about this, but we'll go over to the corn-crib and find out what it's all about."

Kit and Evie secured a good point of vantage up on the porch while the others skirted around the garden over to the old corn-crib where Shad stood sentinel duty.

"My, I like your place over here," Evie exclaimed, wistfully. "You've got so many ornaments out-of-doors. Ma says she can't even grow a nasturtium on our place without the hens scratching it up."

Kit nodded, but could not answer. Already she had what Cynthy Allen called a "premonition" that all was not as it should be at the corn-crib. She saw Shad stealthily and cautiously put back the wide wooden bars that held the door, then Mr. Hicks, fully on the defensive with a stout hickory cane held in readiness for any unseemly onslaught on the part of the culprit, advanced into the corn-crib. Evie drew closer, her little freckled face full of curiosity.

"Ain't Pop brave?" she whispered, "and he never made but two arrests before in all his life. One was over at Miss Hornaby's when she wouldn't let Minnie and Myron go to school 'cause their shoes were all out on the ground, and the other time he got that French weaver over at Beacon Hill for selling cider."

Still Kit had no answer, for over at the corn-crib she beheld the strangest scene. Out stepped the prisoner as fearlessly and blithely as possible, spoke to her father, and the two of them instantly clasped hands, while Shad, Mr. Hicks and Philemon stared with all their might. The next the girls knew, the whole party came strolling back leisurely, and Kit could see the stranger was regaling her father with a humorous view of the whole affair. Shad tried to signal to her behind his back some mysterious warning, and even Mr. Hicks looked jocular.

Kit leaned both hands on the railing, and stared hard at the trespasser. He was a young man, dressed in a light gray suit with high sport boots. He was, as Mrs. Gorham expressed it later, "light complected" and tanned so deeply that his blonde, curly hair seemed even lighter. He lifted his hat to Kit, with one foot on the lower step, while Mr. Robbins called up:

"Mr. Howard, my dear, our fruit expert from Washington, whom I was expecting."

And Kit bowed, blushing furiously and wishing with all her heart she might have silenced Evie's audible and disappointed ejaculation:

"Didn't he hook huckleberries after all?"

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