“Mary-Jane _Peg_.” Kitty linked the two first names, emphasizing the last like a surname. “She won a prize at a fair; she’s a pedigreed pig.”
“Ungh! Ungh!” corroborated Mary-Jane, boastfully, rubbing herself against the captain’s legs as he seated himself with his grandniece.
“Avast there!” boomed Captain Andy. “I haven’t got any prizes, nor yarns to swap with you, either,” applying the toe of his boot to the pink-shot side of the pedigreed pig. “Don’t you—don’t you come hazaracking around me!”
Mary-Jane understood that raging word beginning with “h” as little as Kitty Sill did, and Kitty had never found it in a school dictionary yet, but, somehow, it always cowed her as it did the corkscrew-tailed pig; Mary-Jane made off and Kitty felt constrained to answer something when her great-uncle baldly put the question to her: “Now then, chicken, out with it; what did you mean by talking ’bout dying—dying young, too, as if you meant it?”
But the trout was not caught yet, nor the spiky hook extracted: Kitty opened her mouth, indeed, but this is what she coolly said, with a little, sly smile of mischief, kicking at a leg of the orchard bench with the heel of her swinging slipper:
“Well, I don’t know but what it would be better to die young than have the things that preacher said come true!” with nonchalant indifference.
“What did he say? Where did you hear him?”
“Two years ago at Ma’am Barrows’s house; he had a meeting Sunday afternoon; she said he was a revival preacher,”—the foot swinging vehemently—“but most o’ the folks let on that they considered him a ‘survival,’ or something like that.”
“Oh! I don’t take any stock in it now; I did then; he talked a whole lot about wrath an’ anger comin’ in pailfuls on the earth—that’s what I understood him to say—and ’bout folks calling on the rocks to fall on them an’ hide ’em, so’s the hot wrath couldn’t strike.”
“And what did you do, little Kitty?” Captain Andy was much interested, although he knew he had not got at the spiky secret yet.
“Me!” Kitty raised her level brown eyebrows; the dimples flashed. “Me! Why, I just came home, all tuckered out, and went down to the bottom of the orchard there and picked out that big, tall rock near the stream that has a bed of soft earth under it, an’ I thought that, if worst came to worst, I’d lie down and call on _that_ rock to fall, for ’twas the earth that would, really, tumble on to me—an’ that wouldn’t hurt very much!”