The turkeys had been hatched several days when Ben came to the tenant house door one morning with a sack of coarse corn meal and a bunch of red peppers. The flocks had been turned into the pasture that day and Ellen would make bread for them out of the ground corn and a little of the pepper and feed them at noon near the pond. Ben told her that Miss Tod expected her to watch after them from time to time during the day and to bring them to the barn lot just before dark and close them into their coops. All day Ellen remembered, scarcely able to wait until evening when she should become a part of the movement about the large barns and pens, when she would go, she hardly knew where, and do things she could scarcely foretell behind the small red gate. The two barn lots made right angles with each other and in the extreme end of each stood a large barn, one for the cows and one, that on the left, for the horses and mules. As Ellen approached the enclosures from the cabin she passed near the mule barn while the cow barn lay off to the right, and in the corner where the two lots came near together there was a gate leading into a third lot which was used for the calves and turkeys. This was the small red gate through which she would go. The first day the turkey hens were shy of her and it was Ben who enticed them through the gate, the chicks running uneasily after, slinking under their strange crumpled shoulders. Ellen fed them the pepper bread and the corn, lingering near them to cure them of their fright of her. Ben pumped water into the trough for a short while but when Josie came from the house with pails jangling he left this and went to help with the milking. Mr Al came to give an order to John Bradshaw, and then the milk began to flow into the pails with a high thin crying sound that became low and dull as the liquid beat upon the foam, but other high thin cries overtook the low ones as John Bradshaw filled his pail and started another. Mr Dick was working in the horse barns feeding the mules and horses. He would pass across the runway with a great fork of straw on his shoulder. He was large and tall, like Mr Al, his brother, but younger and more neat. ‘Wakefield Brothers, Stock Farm’ was printed on paper. A piece of it had come fluttering down across the pasture one March day and lodged in the cherry brush. Now the hens were afraid of Ellen and she left them to their corn. She stood off by the gate, feeling useless and incompetent and, when no one was looking, she slipped through the gate and went quickly down the hill.

In a week, however, the strangeness was gone, and when she crumbled pepper bread by the pond at noon the hens came with their speckled broods that cried ‘pee pee pee’. There were five or six hens, each with fifteen or twenty chicks. Ellen’s orders came from Ben who conveyed messages from Miss Tod. ‘Was the old bronze hen a good mother?’ She must be sure to keep the drinking pans clean. Going about her labours Ellen carried pepper bread in her apron pocket and she would give some of this to the chicks whenever she met them. They would flow about her feet like strange water when she walked across the pasture toward the tobacco field.