Then, with my head turned determinedly away from the barn, I sought distraction in an interview with my garden.
Oh, it was rapturous! Can anything in the world be as wonderful as putting queer little brown things in the earth, where it scares you to think of their getting all cold and wet and rotted, and then coming to see them sprout and curl and run out of the ground? No, nothing can compare with it unless it is seeing whole rows of them bursting out into blooms and tassels and little pods and burrs. I felt extravagant and wanted to kiss the whole vegetable family in a way of encouragement and greeting. And the two lilacs were both most beautifully plumed out in their long, white blossoms to greet me. Now, weren't they the plucky young things to bloom that way in a perfectly strange place? Still, everybody always did have confidence in Sam.
But then in every joy patch some weeds are bound to shoot up overnight, and I was horrified to look down the rows of purple beet fronds and see what a lot of bold pepper-grass and chickweed were doing in their trenches. Without waiting to get my gloves from my bag in the car, I fell to and began a determined onslaught. Furiously I charged down two rows and up a third, at whose end I sank with exhaustion.
"Say, Betty, could a cat give kitten dinner to a poor little duck that all the hens peck?" asked the Byrd, anxiously, as he came and squatted beside me with two of the new kittens and the duck orphan in question in his arms.
"No, Byrd, I don't believe so," I answered, from instinct rather than direct knowledge.
"Why is they so many little ones in the world without mothers, me and the duck and the cow that died 'fore Dr. Chubb came, her calf, and now that mean old dog have left her puppies to eat out of a plate?" he asked. He let the kittens slide to the ground, where they sprawled in their blind helplessness, while he began to tenderly pry open the small yellow ball's wide bill and insert crumbs of bread rolled into very realistic pills, but which the patient gobbled with evident appreciation.
"See, Byrd, you are just as good as a mother any day," I said, a choke in my throat as I cuddled his thin little shoulder in the hollow between my arm and my breast, and bent over to watch the orphan's meal.
"Like Sam," answered Byrd, with a queer little flash of his keen eyes up at me, and a grin that was so like Sam's that I tumbled him over onto the grass, duck and all, and began a frolic with him which delighted his heart and eased mine. I've loved that "little one" since the day they let me hold him in my arms when he was only a few hours old and motherless. Examining him from heels to head had comforted Sam in his anguish and eased my own sympathetic sorrow. It is a tradition that Mammy Kitty rescued him just in time; but I've always felt that nothing would have happened to him at Sam's sixteen-year-old hands if he had been left for hours.