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.