Pan took my hand in his as he chanted, and held my fingers to his lips, and ended his chant with several weird, eery, crooning notes blown across his lips and through my fingers out into the moonlit shadows.

"I feel about you just as I do about one of Mrs. Ewe's lambkins," I whispered, with a queer answering laugh in my voice, which held and repeated the croon in his.

"I am thy child.

I am thy mate.

Oh, come!"

again chanted Pan, and it surely wasn't imagination that made me think that the red crests ruffled in the wind. The light in his eyes was unlike anything I had ever seen; it smouldered and flamed like the embers under the pot beside the rock. It drew me until the sleeve of my smock brushed his sleeve of gray flannel. His arms hovered, but didn't quite enclose me.

"And the way I am going to feel about all the little chickens out of the incubator," I added slowly as if the admission was being drawn out of me.

Still the arms hovered, the crests ruffled, and the eyes searched down into the depths of me, which had so lately been plowed and harrowed and sown with a new and productive flower.

"And the old twin fathers," I added almost begrudgingly, as I cast him my last treasure.

Then with a laugh that I know was a line-reproduction descended from the one that Adam gave when he first recognized Eve, Pan folded me into his arms, laid his red head on my breast, and held up his lips to mine with a "love-thirst" that it took me more than a long minute to slack to the point of words.

"I knew there was one earth woman due to develop at the first decade of this century, and I've found her," Pan fluted softly as he in turn took me on his breast and pressed his russet cheek against the tan of mine. "I'm going to take her off into the woods and then in a generation salvation for the nation will come forth from the forest."

"My word is given to the Golden Bird to see his progeny safe into the world, and I must do that before--" but my words ended in a laugh as I slipped out of Pan's arms and sprang to my feet and away from him.

"We'll keep that faith with Mr. Bird to-night, and then I can take you with me before daylight," said Pan as he collected his Romney bundle with his left hand and me with his right and began to pad up the path from the spring-house towards the barn under a shower of the white locust-blossoms, which were giving forth their last breath of perfume in a gorgeous volume.

"To-night?" I asked from the hollow between his breast and his arm where I was fitted and held steadily so that my steps seemed to be his steps and the breath of my lungs to come from his.

"Yes; most of the eggs were pipped when I went in the barn to put away the tools," answered Adam, with very much less excitement than the occasion called for.

"Oh, why--why didn't you tell me?" I demanded as I came out of the first half of a kiss and before I retired into the last half.

"Too hungry--had to be fed before they got to eating at your heart,"

answered Pan in a way that made me know that he meant me and not the dandelion greens and brown bread.

"You are joking me; they are not due until day after to-morrow," I said as I took my lips away and began to hurry us both towards the barn.

"All April hatches are from two to three days early," was Adam's prosaic and instructive answer that cut the last kiss short as we entered the barn-door.

CHAPTER VIII

Quickly I released myself from his arm and flew to kneel in front of the metal mother, with the electric torch aimed directly into the little window that revealed all her inmost processes. The p.e.c.k.e.rwood Pan hovered just at my shoulder, and together we beheld what was to me the most wonderful phenomenon of nature that had ever come my way. No sunset from Pike's Peak or high note from the throat of Caruso could equal it in my estimation.

Behold, the first baby Bird stepped forth into the world right before my astonished and enraptured eyes! It was in this manner.

"Look, right here next to the gla.s.s," said Adam, as he put his finger against the lower left-hand corner of the peep window, and there I directed my torch. One of the great white pearls had a series of little holes around one end of it, and while I gazed a sharp little beak was thrust suddenly from within it. The sh.e.l.l fell apart, and out stepped the first small Leghorn Bird with an a.s.surance that had an undoubted resemblance to that of his masculine parent. For a moment he blinked and balanced; then he stretched his small wings and shook himself, an operation that seemed to fluff about fifty per cent. of the moist aspect from his plump little body, and then he deliberately turned and looked into my wide-opened eyes. I promptly gasped and sat down on the barn floor, with my head weakly cuddled against Adam's knee.

"Two more here on the right-hand side, Woman," said Adam, as he knelt beside me, took the torch, supported me in my reaction of astonishment, and showed me where a perfect little batch of babies was being born. "Whew, Farmer Craddock, but those are fine chickens! Heaven help us, but they are all exploding at one time! Only eggs of one hundred per cent. vigor and fertility hatch that way. Look at the moisture gathering on the gla.s.s. If you put your hand in there you would find it about a hundred and ten."

"Oh, look! G. Bird Junior, the first, is almost dry. Please, please let me take him in my hand!" I exclaimed as that five-minute-old baby pressed close up against the gla.s.s and blinked at the light and us bewitchingly.

"You mustn't open the door for at least twelve hours now. Come away before the temptation overcomes you," commanded Pan.

"Wait twelve hours to take that fluff-ball in my hands? Adam, you are cruel," I said, as he pocketed the torch and left the drama of birth dark and without footlights. As he padded away towards the moonlit barn-door, I followed him in reluctant protest.

"Do you see that tall pine outlined against the sky over there on Paradise Ridge, Woman?" asked Adam, with the Pan lights and laugh coming back into his farmer eyes and voice. "I have got to be there an hour before dawn, and it is fifteen good miles or more. I want to roll against a log somewhere and sleep a bit, and it is now after ten o'clock. Go get your bundle, and I'll hang it on my stick, and we will disappear into the forest forever. I know a hermit who'll put us in marriage bonds. Come!" As he held out his arms Adam began to chant the weird tune to that mate song of his own invention.

"You know I can't do that," I said as I went into his embrace and drank the chant down into my heart. "There are so many live things that I must stay to watch over. I--I'm their--mother as well as--as yours. They must be fed."

"G.o.d, there really is such a thing as a woman," said Adam as he hid his smouldering eyes against my lips. "You'll be waiting when I come back, and you'll go with me the minute I call, if it's day or night? You'll be ready with your bundle?"

"You don't mean at daylight to-morrow, do you, Pan, dear?" I asked, with one of the last laughs that my heart was to know, for sometimes, it seemed forever, rippling out past his crimson crests.

"No; listen to me, Woman," said Adam, as he held me tenderly on his right arm and took both my hands in his and held them pressed hard against my breast. "I am going away to-night, and I don't know when I can get back. I only knew to-day I'd have to go; that's why I--I took you and put my brand on your heart to-night. I can leave you aloose in the forest and know that I'll find you mine when I can come back. But, oh, come with me!"

"I wouldn't be your earth woman, Adam, if I left all these helpless things.

I'll wait for you, and no matter when you come I'll be ready. Only, only you'll never take me quite away from them all, will you?"

"No; I'll build a nest over there in the big woods, and you can go back and forth between my--my brood and Mr. G. Bird's," promised Adam with Pan's fluty laugh.

"Branded, and I don't even know the initials on the brand," I said to myself as I stood on the front steps under a honeysuckle vine that was twining with a musky rose in a death struggle as to the strength of their perfumes, and watched Adam go padding swiftly and silently away from me down the long avenue of elms. A mocking-bird in a tree over by the fence was pouring out showers of notes of liquid love, and ringdoves cooed and softly nestled up under the eaves above my head. "I'm a woman and I've found my mate. I am going to be part of it all," I said to myself as I sank to the step and began to brood with the night around me.

I think that G.o.d gives it sometimes to a woman to have a night in which she sits alone brooding her love until somehow it waxes so strong and brave that it can face death by starvation and cold and betrayal and still live triumphant. It is so that He recreates His children.

"Now, of course, Ann, everybody admires your pluck about this retiring from the world and becoming a model rustic, but it does seem to me that you might admit that some of your old friends have at least a part of the attraction for you that is vested in, well, say old Mrs. Red Ally, for instance. Will you or will you not come in to dine and to wine and to dance at the country club with Matthew Sat.u.r.day evening?" Bess delivered herself of the text of her mission to me before she descended from her cherry roadster in front of the barn.

"Oh, Bess, just come and see old Mrs. Red and never, never ask me to feel about a mere friend of my childhood like I do about her," I answered with welcome and excitement both in my voice. "Do come quick and look!"

"Coming," answered Bess, with delightful enthusiasm and no wounded pride, as she left the car in one motion and swept into the barn with me in about two more.

"Now, just look at that," I said as I opened the top of the long box that is called a brooder and is supposed to supplement the functions of the metal incubator mother in the destiny of chicken young. It has feed and water-pans in it, straw upon the floor as a carpet, and behind flannel portieres is supposed to burn a lamp with mother ardor sufficient to keep the small fledglings warm, though orphaned. Did the week-old babies Leghorn have to be content with such mechanical mothering? Not at all! Right in the middle of the brooder sat the old Red Ally, and her huge red wings were stretched out to cover about twenty-five of the metal-born babies and part of her own fifteen, and spread in a close, but fluffy, circle around her were the rest of her adopted family all cosily asleep and happy at heart.

"I left the top of the brooder open while I went for water the second day after hers and the incubator's had hatched, and when I came back she was just as you see her now, in possession of the entire orphan-asylum."

"Oh, look, she's putting some out from under her and taking others in. Oh, Ann!" exclaimed Bess as she dropped on her knees beside the long box.

"Yes; she changes them like that. I've seen her do it," I answered, with my cheeks as pink with excitement as were those of my sympathetic friend, Elizabeth Rutherford. "And you ought to see her take them all out for a walk across the gra.s.s. They all peep and follow, and she clucks and scratches impartially."

"Ann," said Bess, with a great solemnity in the dark eyes that she raised to mine, "I suppose I ought to marry Owen _this_ June. I want to have another winter of good times, but I--I'm ashamed to look this hen in the face."

"Owen is perfectly lovely," I answered her, which was a very safely noncommittal answer in the circ.u.mstances.

"He carries one of the chickens he bought from you in his pocket all the time, with all necessary food, and it is much larger than any of mine or his in my conservatory. Owen is the one who goes in to tend to them when he brings me home from parties and things and--and--"

"Matthew took off all of his and Polly's little Reds yesterday, and I've never seen him so--so--" I paused for a word to express the tenderness that was in dear old Matt's face as he put the little tan fluff-b.a.l.l.s one at a time into Polly Corn-ta.s.sel's outstretched skirt.

"Matthew is a wonder, Ann, and you've got to come to this dance he is giving Corn-ta.s.sel Sat.u.r.day--all for love of you because you asked him to look after her. He is the sweetest thing to her--just like old Mrs. Red here, spreads his wings and fusses if any man who isn't a lineal descendant of Sir Galahad comes near her. He's going to be awfully hurt if you don't come."

"Then I'll tear myself away from my family and come, though I truly can't see that I wished Polly Corn-ta.s.sel upon all of you. You are just as crazy about the apple-blossom darling as I am, you specially, Bess Rutherford,"

I answered, with pleased indignation.