I'll go home early,
before Marthy finds it out."

She really meant to do that, but the fish were hungry fish that day,
and the joy of having a companion to exclaim with her over every hard
tug--even though that companion was only Jase--enticed her to stay on
and on, until a whiff of frying pork on the breeze that swept down the
Cove warned Billy Louise of the near approach of supper-time.

"I guess mebby I might as well go back to the suller," Jase remarked,
his defiance weakening as he climbed the bank. "You come and lock the
door agin, Billy Louise, and Marthy won't know I ain't been there all
the time. She'll think you caught the fish." He looked at her with a
weak leer of conscious cunning.

Billy Louise, groping vaguely for the sunbonnet that was dangling
between her straight shoulder-blades, stared at him with wide eyes that
held disillusionment and with it a contempt all the keener because it
was the contempt of a child, whose judgment is merciless.

"I should thing you'd be ashamed!" she said at last, forgetting that
the idea had been born in her own brain. "Cowards do things and then
sneak about it. Daddy says so. I don't care if Marthy is mad 'cause I
let you out, and I don't care if she knows we went fishing. I thought
you wanted Marthy to see she ain't so smart, locking you up in the
cellar. I ain't going to bake you a single cookie with raisings on it,
like I was going to."

"Marthy's got a sharp tongue in 'er head," Jase wavered, his eyes
shifting from Billy Louise's uncompromising stare.

"Daddy says when you do a thing that's mean, do it and take your
medicine," Billy Louise retorted. "The boy of me that belongs to dad
ain't a sneak, Jase Meilke. And," she added loftily, "the girl of me
that belongs to mommie is a perfeck lady. Good day, Mr. Meilke. Thank
you for a pleasant time fishing."

Whereupon the perfect lady part switched short skirts up the path and
held a tousled head high with disdain.

Jase, thus deserted, went shambling back to the cellar and fell to
sprouting potatoes with what might almost be termed industry.

It pained Jase later to discover that Marthy was not interested in the
open door, but in the very small heap of potatoes which he had
"sprouted" that afternoon. There was other work to be done in the
Cove, and there were but two pairs of hands to do it; that one pair was
slow and shiftless and inefficient was bitterly accepted by Marthy, who
worked from sunris