d in the
direction of the open gate; in the midst of his panting and pain the
captain found a slight comfort in the fact that he was driving the
creatures toward the gate.

At last they were almost there--that is, the main body. Kendrick noted,
with sudden uneasiness, that there were stragglers. A gaily decorated
old rooster, a fowl with a dissipated and immoral swagger and a knowing,
devil-may-care tilt of the head, was sidling off to the left. Two or
three young pullets were following the lead of this ancient pirate,
evidently fascinated by his recklessness. The captain turned to head off
the wanderers. They squawked and ran hither and thither. He succeeded in
turning them back, but, at the moment of his success, heard triumphant
cluckings at his rear. The rest of the flock had, while his attention
was diverted by the rooster and his followers, galloped joyfully back to
the garden again. Now, as Captain Sears gazed, the rooster and his
satellites flew to join them. All hands--or, more literally, all
feet--resumed excavating with the abandon of conscientious workers
striving to make up lost time.

And now Sears Kendrick did lose his temper. Probably at another time he
might have laughed, but now he was tired, in pain, and in no mood to see
the humorous side of the situation. He expressed his opinion of the hens
and the rooster, using quarter deck idioms and withholding little. If
the objects of his wrath were disturbed they did not show it. If they
were shocked they hid their confusion in the newly turned earth of Judah
Cahoon's squash bed.

Whether they were shocked or not Sears did not stop to consider. He
intended to shock them to the fullest extent of the word's meaning. At
his feet was a stick, almost a log, part of the limb of a pear tree. He
picked up this missile and hurled it at the marauders. It missed them
but it struck in the squash bed and tore at least six of the delicate
young squashlings from their moorings. Kendrick plunged after it--the
hens separating as he advanced and rejoining at his rear--picked up the
log and, turning, again hurled it.

"There!" roared the captain, "take that, damn you!"

One of the hens did "take it." So did some one else. The missile struck
just beneath the fowl as she fled, lifted her and a peck or two of soil
as well, and hurled the whole mass almost into the face of a person who,
unseen until then, had advanced along the path from the gate and had
arrived at that spot