to herself--

"Yes, Joe Barron, an' I'll show ye the thief. An' he'll have quills on
him, sech as no _weasel_ ain't never had on him, I reckon."

On her return, Mrs. Gammit was greeted by the sound of high
excitement among the poultry. They were all cackling wildly, and
craning their necks to stare into the shed as if they had just seen a
ghost there. Mrs. Gammit ran in to discover what all the fuss was
about. The place was empty; but a smashed egg lay just outside one of
the nests, and a generous tuft of fresh feathers showed her that there
had been a tussle of some kind. Indignant but curious, Mrs. Gammit
picked up the feathers, and examined them with discriminating eyes to
see which hen had suffered the loss.

"Lands sakes!" she exclaimed presently, "ef 'tain't the old rooster!
He's made a fight fer that 'ere aig! Lucky he didn't git stuck full o'
quills!"

Then, for perhaps the hundredth time, she ran fiercely and noisily
behind the barn, in the hope of surprising the enemy. Of course she
surprised nothing which Nature had endowed with even the merest
apology for eyes and ears; and a cat-bird in the choke-cherry bushes
squawked at her derisively. Stealth was one of the things which Mrs.
Gammit did not easily achieve. Staring defiantly about her, her eyes
fell upon a dark, bunchy creature in the top of an old hemlock at the
other side of the fence. Seemingly quite indifferent to her vehement
existence, and engrossed in its own affairs, it was crawling out upon
a high branch and gnawing, in a casual way, at the young twigs as it
went.

"Ah, ha! What did I tell ye? I knowed all along as how it was a
porkypine!" exclaimed Mrs. Gammit, triumphantly, as if Joe Barron
could hear her across eight miles of woods. Then, as she eyed the
imperturbable animal on the limb above her, her face flushed with
quick rage, and snatching up a stone about the size of her fist she
hurled it at him with all her strength.

In a calmer moment she would never have done this--not because it was
rude, but because she had a conviction, based on her own experience,
that a stone would hit anything rather than what it was aimed at. And
in the present instance she found no reason to change her views on the
subject. The stone did not hit the porcupine. It did not, even for one
moment, distract his attention from the hemlock twigs. Instead of
that, it struck a low branch, on the other side of the tree, and
bounced back briskly upon Mrs. Gammit'