When the party returned, Mrs. Berry was with them, and she and Rose bore between them a small tub of freshly-fried hot doughnuts.  Mrs. Berry had utterly refused to trust it to the young men.  “I know better than to let you have it,” she said, laughing.  “You’d eat all the way there, and there wouldn’t be enough left to go round.  Me and Rose will carry it; it ain’t very heavy.”  William and Barney each bore two great jugs of molasses-and-water spiced with ginger.

Silas pulled himself up stiffly when he saw them coming; he had been sitting upon the peaked rock whereon Ezra Ray had kept vigil with the cow-bell.  Full of anxiety had he been all day lest they should pick from any except the four trees which he had set apart for them, and his anxiety was greater since he knew that the best cherries were not on those four trees.  Silas sidled painfully towards his wife and daughter; he peered over into the tub, but they swung it remorselessly past him, even knocking his shin with its iron-bound side.

“What you got there?” he demanded, huskily.

“Don’t you say one word,” returned his wife, with a fierce shake of her head at him.

“What’s in them jugs?”

“It’s nothing but sweetened water.  Don’t, father,” pleaded Rose under her breath, her pretty face flaming.

Her mother scowled indomitably at Silas tagging threateningly at her elbow.  “Don’t you say one word,” she whispered again.

“You ain’t goin’ to—­give ’em—­”

“Don’t you speak,” she returned, hissing out the “s.”

Silas said no more.  He followed on, and watched the doughnuts being distributed to the merry party seated in a great ring like a very garland of youth under his trees; he saw them drink his sweetened water.

“Don’t you want some?” asked his wife’s defiantly pleasant voice in his ear.

“No, I don’t want none,” he returned.

Finally, long before they had finished eating, he went home to the tavern.  There was no one in the house.  He stole cautiously into the pantry, and there was a reserve of doughnuts in a large milk-pan sitting before the window.  Silas crooked his old arm around the pan, carried it painfully across the great kitchen and the entry into the best room, and pushed it far under the bureau.  Then he returned, and concealed the molasses-jug in the brick oven.  He stood for a minute in the middle of the kitchen floor, chuckling and nodding as if to the familiar and confidential spirit of his own greed; then he went out, and a short way down the road to the cottage house where old Hiram Baxter lived and kept a little shoemaker’s shop in the L. He entered, and sat down in the little leather-reeking place with Hiram, and was safe and removed from inquiry when Mrs. Berry returned to the tavern for the remaining doughnuts and to mix more sweetened water.  The doughnuts could not be found, but she carried a pail across to the store, got more molasses from the barrel, and so in one point outwitted her husband.