Peggy Raymond's Vacation Part 4

Priscilla looked up in surprise.

"Why, I know I said we'd take a walk. But this will be a walk and a lot of fun beside."

"But, don't you see," Claire leaned toward her and spoke rapidly, "it can't take the place of strolling through the woods just with you alone?

There are so many of us girls that I'm simply hungry to have you to myself. I've just been living on the thought of it ever since you promised me last night."

"Very well," said Priscilla compressing her lips. She resolved to be very careful what she said to Claire, if any casual remark could be construed into a binding promise. With dismay she realized that it was not yet twenty-four hours since their arrival, and already Claire's demonstrations of affection were becoming irksome.

If she had cherished the hope that Claire would relent, she was destined to disappointment. An early dinner was eaten, and the dishes washed with an alacrity in agreeable contrast to the dilatory methods of the morning. Then the party divided, Claire and Priscilla going off in the direction of the woods--Priscilla walking with more than her usual erectness--while the others took the route to the pastures where the raspberries grew, Peggy having ascertained their exact location in her talk with Joe that morning.

The array of tin pails with the berrying party suggested the probability that the occupants of Dolittle Cottage would eat nothing but raspberries for a week. Aunt Abigail and Dorothy had insisted on equipping themselves with the largest size of pail, though it was noticeable that when they were once in the pasture, most of the berries they gathered went into their mouths. And in this they were undoubtedly wise, for a raspberry fresh from the bushes, warmed by the sun, and fragrant as a rose, with perhaps a blood-red drop of fairy wine in its delicate cup, is vastly superior to its subdued, civilized self, served in a gla.s.s dish and smothered in sugar.

It was not long before Aunt Abigail and Dorothy were taking their ease under a tree and placidly eating a few berries which had found a temporary respite at the bottom of their pails. Ruth picked with painstaking conscientiousness, and Peggy with the enjoyment which converts industry into an art. As for Amy, she wandered about the pasture always sure that the next spot was a more promising field of operations than the nearer. She was some distance from the others when her search was rewarded by the discovery of a clump of bushes unusually full.

"There!" exclaimed Amy triumphantly, as if answering the argument of her almost empty pail. "I knew I'd find them thicker. Peggy--oh, Peg--"

Her summons broke off in a startled squeal. There was a rustle on the other side of the bushes, and Amy took a flying leap which landed her on her knees with her overturned pail beside her. She screamed again, and a girl in a gingham dress and sunbonnet of the same material, ran out from behind the leafy screen.

"Oh, I'm sorry if I frightened you," she exclaimed. "I hope you're not hurt."

Amy scrambled to her feet with a sigh of immense relief.

"No, indeed, and I shouldn't have been scared only I thought it was a cow."

The grave young face set in the depths of the sunbonnet broke into a smile that quite transformed it.

"Even if it had been," the girl suggested, "it wouldn't have been so very dangerous, you know."

"Maybe not." Amy's tone was dubious. And then as Peggy and Ruth came hurrying to the spot, she turned to give them an explanation of the scream which had summoned them in such haste. All four laughed together, and the girl in the sunbonnet had an odd sense of being well acquainted with the friendly invaders.

"I suppose introductions are in order," Amy rattled on, "but, you see, I don't know your name."

"I'm Lucy Haines."

"Well, this is Peggy Raymond, our mistress of ceremonies, and this is Ruth Wylie, who thinks everything that Peggy does is exactly right, and I'm the scatterbrain of the lot."

Lucy Haines looked a little bewildered as she met the girls' smiles, when Peggy came to the rescue. "A crowd of us are in Mrs. Leighton's cottage for the summer, and this is our first berrying. Don't you think I've had good luck?" She tilted her pail to show its contents, and Lucy Haines admired as in duty bound.

"Let's see how you've done," suggested Amy, and Lucy brought from the other side of the raspberry bushes a large-sized milk-pail so heaping full that the topmost berries looked as if they were contemplating escape. The girls exclaimed in chorus.

"You don't mean that you've picked those all yourself," cried Amy, remembering the scanty harvest she had spilled in her tumble.

"Your family must be very fond of raspberries," observed Ruth.

"Raspberry jam, I suppose," said the practical Peggy, but the sunbonnet negatived the suggestion by a slow shake.

"No. It's not that. I pick berries for pay. I send them into the city on the express train every night as long as the season lasts. I want to go to school," she ended rather abruptly, "and I'm ready to do anything I can to make a little money."

"And did you really pick them all to-day?" persisted Amy, eyeing the milk-pail respectfully. "It would take me a year, at the least calculation."

Lucy Haines smiled gravely at the extravagance. "I've been doing it all my life," she said. "That makes a difference."

"Then you've lived here always?"

"Yes, and my mother before me, and her mother, too. When I was a little girl I used to love to hear grandmother tell how one time she was picking blackberries in this very pasture, and she heard a sound and peered around the bush. And there sat a brown bear, eating berries as fast as he could."

"I'm glad Dorothy isn't around to hear that story," Peggy cried laughing; "she'd be sure it was bears whenever anything rustled." But Amy's face was serious.

"That's worse than cows!" she exclaimed. "The next time I hear a noise on the other side of a bush, I shan't even dare to scream."

Lucy Haines s.h.i.+fted her pail from her left hand to her right. "Well, I guess I'll call my stint done for to-day. Good-by!"

"Good-by," the others echoed, and Peggy added, with her friendly smile, "I suppose we'll see you again some day. I hope so, I'm sure."

She repeated the wish a little later, as the sunbonnet went out of sight over the brow of the hill. "Because she seems such a nice sort of girl.

I'm going to like this place, I know. There are such interesting people in it."

"Oh, Peggy," Amy cried with a teasing laugh, "you know you'd like any place, and you find all kinds of people interesting." And then because the sight of Lucy Haines' full pail had made them somewhat dissatisfied with the results of their own efforts, they all fell to picking with a tremendous display of industry.

Priscilla and Claire were on the porch when the others came home laden with their spoils. Claire wore a noticeable air of complacency, but Priscilla looked a little tired and despondent. All through their stroll Claire had harped on the joy of being by themselves at last, and had insisted on walking with her arm about Priscilla's waist, which on a narrow path was inconvenient, to say the least. Priscilla was rather ashamed to acknowledge even to herself that she found Claire's devotion wearisome. Of course, Claire was a very sweet girl, but it was so easy to have a surfeit of sweets.

"I hope you left a few on the bushes," she said rather resentfully, when the berry-pickers had recounted their experiences with an enthusiasm which gave to the expedition through the pasture the glamor of real adventure, "I'd like the fun of picking some real berries myself."

"We might go to-morrow," Claire suggested in a careful undertone.

Priscilla's face flushed, and Peggy seeing her look of annoyance, created a diversion by springing to her feet.

"Time to get supper. I'm as hungry as a wolf, now that I stop to think about it. How does cornbread and fried fish strike the crowd?"

"O Peggy," Priscilla forgot her vexation in the importance of the announcement to be made, "the frying-pan has been borrowed!"

"Borrowed!" Peggy stood motionless in her astonishment. "But who--but why--"

"It's a woman who lives down the road a way. I suppose she's what you call a neighbor up here. What did she say her name was, Claire?"

"Snooks. Mrs. Snooks."

"Oh, yes. And she was very much interested in everything about us, and asked all kinds of questions. But she came especially to borrow the frying-pan. Can you get along without it, Peggy?"

"Why, if you can't have what you want, you can always make something else do," returned Peggy, unconsciously formulating one of the axioms in her philosophy of life. "But a frying-pan seems such a strange thing to borrow, Priscilla. She must have one of her own, and it's not a thing one's likely to mislay. However," she added hastily, as if fearful of seeming to blame the over-generous lender, "we'll get along. Well just forget that we ever had a frying-pan, and that it was borrowed."

But, as Peggy was soon to learn, it was not going to be an easy matter to forget Mrs. Snooks.

CHAPTER IV

A STUDY IN NATURAL HISTORY