“I think dem boys had bettah cotch some of dem chicken thieves,” put in Aleck Pop.  “Yo’ don’t seem to git holt ob dem nohow.”

“Oh, never you mind about the chicken thieves,” grumbled Jack Ness.

“Has somebody been stealing chickens again?” asked Dick, remembering that they had suffered several times from such depradations.

“Yes, da has took two chickens las’ Wednesday, foah on Saturday, an’ two on Monday.  Jack he laid fo’ ’em wid a shotgun, but he didn’t cotch nobody.”

“I’ll catch them yet, see if I don’t,” said the hired man.

“Perhaps a fox is doing it,” suggested Sam.  “If so, we ought to go on a fox hunt.  That would suit me first rate.”

“No fox in this,” answered Jack Ness.  “I see the footprints of two men,—­tramps, I reckon.  If I catch sight of ’em I’ll fill ’em full of shot and then have ’em locked up.”

CHAPTER III

FUN ON THE FARM

Two days passed and the boys felt once more at home on the farm.  The strain of the recent examinations and the closing exercises at school had gone and as Sam declared, “they were once more themselves,” and ready for anything that might turn up.

In those two days came another telegram from Mr. Rover, sent from Philadelphia, in which he stated that he had caught his man, but had lost him again.  He added that he would be home probably on the following Sunday.  This message came in on Monday, so the boys knew they would have to wait nearly a week before seeing their parent.

“I am just dying to know what it is all about,” said Tom, and the others said practically the same.

Tom could not keep down his propensities for joking and nearly drove Sarah, the cook, to distraction by putting some barn mice in the bread box in the pantry and by pouring ink over some small stones and then adding them to the coal she was using in the kitchen range.  He also took a piece of old rubber bicycle tire and trimmed it up to resemble a snake and put it in Jack Ness’ bed in the barn, thereby nearly scaring the hired man into a fit.  Ness ran out of the room in his night dress and raised such a yell that he aroused everybody in the house.  He got his shotgun and blazed away at the supposed snake, thereby ruining a blanket, two sheets, and filling the mattress with shot.  When he found out how he had been hoaxed he was the most foolish looking man to be imagined.

“You just wait, Master Tom, I’ll get square,” he said.

“Who said I put a snake in your bed?” demanded Tom.  “I never did such a thing in my life.”

“No, but you put that old rubber in, and I know it,” grumbled the hired man and then went back to bed.

Tom also had his little joke on Aleck Pop.  One evening he saw the colored man dressing up to go out and learned that he was going to call on a colored widow living at Dexter’s Corners, a nearby village.