The Golden Bird | Page 6

their feet together with a
piece of cord he had taken from a deep pocket in the gray trousers.
"Oh, thank you," I said with a depth of gratitude in my voice that I did

not know I possessed. "You are the most wonderful man I ever saw--I
mean that I ever saw with chickens," I said, ending the remark in an
agony of embarrassment. "I don't know much about them. I mean
chickens," I hastened to add, and made matters worse.
"Oh, they are easy, when you get to know 'em, chickens--or men," he
said kindly, without a spark in his eyes back of their black bushes. "Are
they yours?"
"They are all the property I have got in the world," I answered as I
clasped the last pair of biddies to my breast, for while we had been
holding our primitive conversation, I had been obeying his directions
and loading the Birds into Grandmother Craddock's stately equipage.
Anxiety shone from my eyes into his sympathetic ones.
"Well, you'll be an heiress in no time with them to start you, with 'good
management.' I never saw a finer lot," he said, as he walked to the door
of the carriage with me, with the last pair of white Leghorn ladies in his
arms.
"But maybe I haven't got that management," I faltered, with my anxiety
getting tearful in my words.
"Oh, you'll learn," he said, with such heavenly soothing in his voice
that I almost reached out my hands and clung to him as he settled the
fussing poultry in the bottom of the carriage in such a way as to leave
room for my feet among them. Mr. G. Bird was perched on the seat at
my side and was craning his neck down and soothingly scolding his
family. "How are you, Mr. Craddock?" Pan asked of Uncle Cradd's
back, and by his question interrupted an argument that sounded, from
the Greek phrases flying, like a battle on the walls of Troy.
"Well, well, how are you, Adam?" exclaimed Uncle Cradd, as he
turned around and greeted the woodsman with a smile of positive
delight.
I had known that man's name was Adam, but I don't know how I knew.

"This is my brother, Mr. William Craddock, who's come home to me to
live and die where he belongs, and that young lady is Nancy. Those
chickens are just a whim of hers, and we have to humor her. Can we lift
you as far as Riverfield?" Uncle Cradd made his introduction and
delivered his invitation all in one breath.
"I'm glad to meet you, sir, and I am grateful for your assistance in
capturing my daughter's whims," said father, as he came partly out of
his B.C. daze.
As he took my hand into his slender, but very powerful grasp, that man
had the impertinence to laugh into my eyes at my parent's
double-entendre, which he had intended as a simple single remark.
"No, thank you, sir; I've got to get across Paradise Ridge before
sundown. The lambs are dropping fast over at Plunkett's, and I want to
make sure those Southdown ewes are all right," he answered as he put
my hand out of his, though I almost let it rebel and cling, and took for a
second the Golden Bird's proud head into his palm.
"I'll be over at Elmnest before your--your 'good judgment' needs mine,"
he said to me as softly as I think a mother must speak to a child as she
unloosens clinging dependent fingers. As he spoke he shut the door of
the old ark, and Uncle Cradd drove on, leaving him standing on the
edge of the great woods looking after us.
"Oh, I wish that man were going home with us, Mr. G. Bird, or we
were going home with him," I said with a kind of terror of the unknown
creeping over me. As I spoke I reached out and cuddled the Golden
darling into the hollow of my arm. Some day I am going to travel to the
East shore of Baltimore to the Rosecomb Poultry Farm to see the
woman who raised the Golden Bird and cultivated such a beautiful
confiding, and affectionate nature in him. He soothed me with a
chuckle as he pecked playfully at my fingers and then called cheerfully
down to the tethered white Ladies of Leghorn.
CHAPTER II

As we ambled towards the sun, which was setting over old Harpeth, the
tallest humpbacked hill on Paradise Ridge, the Greek battle raged on
the front seat and there was peace with anxiety in the back of the
ancestral coach.
As the wheels and the two old gentlemen rumbled and the Bird's family
clucked and crooned, with only an occasional irritated squawk, I, for
the first