He was only joking, but there was no answering glint of humor in Kit’s eyes.  Very seriously, she stretched out her hand to him.

“I’ll never, never even think of you as a berry hooker again, Stanley,” she promised.  “I didn’t know you were going away off over there until Billie told me, and I’m willing now to say I am sorry for that first day, and Shad locking you up, and Mr. Hicks coming to arrest you.”

“I do believe you’re trying to forgive me, Kit,” Stanley said, teasingly.  “Is this a truce, or a lasting peace?  You see, I want to know for sure, because I haven’t any sisters, or mother, or any one who cares a rap whether I go or stay, and you’re the first person who’s even mentioned it.  I guess that must be why I like to stay around Greenacres so well.  I never knew anything about the fun of being in a family before until you all took me in here.  There ought to be a tablet on that old corn-crib, ’Sacred to the memory of the day I found a family.’”

“It’s peace,” Kit answered, firmly, giving him her hand.  “Here, you can have my watch strap as security.  That’s the way we always do.”

She slipped the little silver watch out, and handed him the strap.

“If it won’t fit your wrist, just carry it.  I’d like to think something of mine was really over there, and I’ve always loved that.  Jean cut it out of leather for me, and made it; even the little copper slides she hammered out herself.”

Stanley was very busy detaching the charm he wore on his fob.  It was a little amulet-shaped oblong of dull silver with a tree on it in relief.

“Like playing forfeits, isn’t it?” he said, rather boyishly.  “This is all I’ve got.  It’s an Indian charm I had given me down in New Mexico, but the tree is alive and growing.  It isn’t a sunken snag.”

Kit held it up in delight.  It was exactly to her liking, and she said laughingly the little, childish formula of party days: 

    “Heavy, heavy hangs over your head,
     What shall the owner do to redeem it?”

“Are you going to eat all those apples, Kit?” asked Doris, her curly rumpled hair showing over the top of the hammock, and Kit tucked away her service charm against the day of its redemption.

***End of the project gutenberg EBOOK Kit of Greenacre farm***

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