Peter looked after them and his jaw dropped. "Well, I'll be darned!" he muttered "You bet I'll have to drown that man."
Rebecca Mary had walked over to the farmhouse for Joan, but Joan was feeding the chickens and just couldn't come at once, so Rebecca Mary sat down on the steps and talked with Mrs. Erickson until the last downy chicken had been given its dinner.
"My, Miss Wyman, I expect you'll be glad when they're through their work here and you can leave," Mrs. Erickson remarked sympathetically, as she offered Rebecca Mary a plate of crispy flaky gooseberry tarts. "It must have been pretty hard to start for a wedding and find yourself in jail. I know how it is with me. I never was much of a gadabout, but, land knows, I'll be glad enough when the guards are taken off, and I can come and go as I please."
"It is rather horrid," Rebecca Mary carelessly agreed as she ate a gooseberry tart. "But I'm not having such a bad time really, Mrs. Erickson. It might be a lot worse."
"I wish I could look at it like that. But I ain't one to dwell much on the cheerful side of things. What's the use, I say, when there's so much that ain't cheerful. I suppose the old Major knows what he's about, but there's queer things going on in Riverside, or I miss my guess."
Rebecca Mary looked up quickly. "What do you mean?" she wanted to know at once. Mrs. Erickson looked as if she meant such a lot.
Mrs. Erickson drew a sigh from the sole of her stout shoes and moved closer to Rebecca Mary, quite ready and willing to tell her what she meant.
"Well," she said in a whisper which blew a lock of Rebecca Mary's yellow brown hair across her face, "as I understand it, Major Martingale brought all these men down here to work on his experiment and locked us up with them so he wouldn't be disturbed or interrupted and so he wouldn't have any Germans nosing around. Wouldn't you think, then, that he wouldn't want any Germans here? But last night her father," she nodded to Joan, who was vainly trying to divide the dinner evenly among the hungry chickens, "was over here talking to one of the mechanics, George Weiss. He took him down behind the shed there and talked to him in German. They didn't know I heard them, but I did. There isn't much that goes on around Riverside that I don't hear something of. Erickson said talking German don't mean anything but it does to me. Don't it to you?"