These marauding wolves had at first terrified her, but in her life on the prairies she had learned to know them better.

Gathering each a bit of stick, she and Aunt Lucy drove away the two grinning daylight thieves, as they had done dozens of times before their kin, all eager for a taste of this new feathered game that had come in upon the range.

With plenteous words of admonition, the two corralled the excited but terror-stricken speckled hen, which had been the occasion of the trouble, driving her back within the gates of the inclosure they had found a necessity for the preservation of the fowls of their "hen ranch." Once inside the protecting walls, the erring one raised her feathers in great anger and stalked away in high dudgeon, clucking out anathemas against a country where a law-abiding hen could not venture a quarter of a mile from home, even at the season when bugs were juiciest.
"It's that same Domineck, isn't it, Lucy ?" said Mary Ellen, leaning over the fence and gazing at the fowls.
"Yess'm, that same ole hen, blame her fool soul! She's mo' bother'n she's wuf.

I 'clare, ever' time I takes them er' chickens out fer a walk that ole Sar' Ann hen, she boun' fer to go off by herse'f somewheres, she's that briggotty; an' first thing I knows, dar she is in trouble again--low down, no 'count thing, I say!" "Poor old Sarah!" said Mary Ellen.

"Why, Aunt Lucy, she's raised more chickens than any hen we've got." "Thass all right, Miss Ma'y Ellen, thass all right, so she have, but she made twict as much trouble as any hen we got, too.