CHAPTER IX


When I came out with a bucket of the new wheat in my hand, I heard Bess and
her car departing, with Uncle Cradd's sonorous speech mingling with the
puff of the engine.

"We are all alone, Mr. G. Bird, and we love it, because then we can talk
comfortably about our Mr. Adam," I said to the Golden Bird as he followed
me around the side of the barn where a door had been cut by Pan himself to
make an entry into my improvised chicken-house.

Suddenly I was answered by a very interesting chuckling and clucking, and I
turned to see what had disengaged the attention of Mr. G. Bird from me and
my feed-bucket. The sight that met my eyes lifted the shadow that had lain
between the Golden Bird and me since the morning I had taken him in to see
his newly arrived progeny and had not been able to make him notice their
existence. Stretching out behind me was a trail of wheat that had dripped
from a hole in the side of the bucket, and along the sides of it the
paternal Bird was marshaling his reliable foster-mother, Mrs. Red Ally's
and all his own fluffy white progeny. With exceeding generosity he was not
eating a grain himself, but scratching and chortling encouragingly.

"I knew you were not like other chicken men, Mr. G. Bird, 'male indifferent
to hatches,' as the book said," I exclaimed as he caught up with me and
began to peck the grains I offered from my hand. "You are just like Owen