“Well, anyway,” called Merle, still in hushed tones, “I guess I got enough berries from this place.”

“Aw, come on!” urged the worker.

In a rush of bravado he now extemporized a chant of defiance: 

    Old Jonas Whipple
    Was an old cripple! 
    Old Jonas Whipple
    Was an old cripple!

The Merle twin found this beyond endurance.  He leaped for the fence and gained its top, looking back with a blanched face to see the offender smitten.  He wanted to go at once, but this might be worth waiting for.

Wilbur continued to pick berries.  Again he chanted loudly, mocking the solemnities of eternity: 

    Old Jonas Whipple
    Was an old cripple! 
    Was an old—­

The mockery died in his throat, and he froze to a statue of fear.  Beyond the headstone of Jonas Whipple, and toward the centre of the plot, a clump of syringa was plainly observed to sway with the movements of a being unseen.

“I told you!” came the hoarse whisper of Merle, but he, too, was chained by fright to the fence top.

They waited, breathless, in the presence of the king of terrors.  Again the bush swayed with a sinister motion.  A deeper hush fell about them; the breeze died and song birds stilled their notes.  A calamity was imminent.  Neither watcher now doubted that a mocked Jonas Whipple would terribly issue from the tangle of shrubbery.

The bushes were again agitated; then at the breaking, point of fear for the Cowan twins the emergent figure proved to be not Jonas but a trifling and immature female descendant of his, who now sped rapidly toward them across the intervening glade, nor were the low mounds sacred to her in her progress.  Her short shirt of a plaid gingham flopped above her thin, bony legs as she ran, and she grasped a wide-brimmed straw hat in one hand.

* * * * *

It should be said that this girl appalled the twins hardly less than would an avenging apparition of the outraged Jonas Whipple.  Beings of a baser extraction, they had looked upon Whipples only from afar and with awe.  Upon this particular Whipple they had looked with especial awe.  Other known members of the tribe were inhumanly old and gray and withered, not creatures with whom the most daring fancy could picture the Cowan twins sustaining any sane human relationship.  But this one was young and moderately understandable.  Observed from across the room of the Methodist Sunday-school, she was undoubtedly human like them; but always so befurbished with rare and shining garments, with glistening silks and costly velvets and laces, with bonnets of pink rosebuds and gloves of kid, that the thought of any secular relationship had been preposterous.  Yet she was young, an animal of their own age, whose ways could be comprehended.

She halted her mad flight when she discovered them, then turned to survey the way she had come.  She was panting.  The twins regarded her stonily, shaping defenses if she brought up anything regarding any one who might have mocked Jonas Whipple.