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“Well,” said Jane, “you know times are hard and prices low.”

Aunt Elmira hadn’t quite expected this. A spark came into her queer little amber eyes.

“I’m paying my board,” she said, “and I earned my keep years before I started doing that. Ah well, I’m of no consequence to them now, Jane. We’re not, after we get ill.”

“No, I suppose not,” agreed Jane.

“Oh, I know too well I’m a burden to every one. But it won’t be for long, Jane, it won’t be for long. The hand of death is on me, Jane. I realize that if nobody else does.”

“Oh, I think they do,” said Jane. “They’re in a hurry to get the barn shingled before the funeral.”

The spark in Aunt Elmira’s eyes deepened.

“I s’pose they’ve got it all planned out, have they?” she said.

“Well, I did hear Mr Bell saying something about where he would dig the grave. But maybe he meant the white cow’s. I think it was the cow’s. It choked to death this morning, you know. And he said he must have the south gate painted white before … something … but I didn’t just catch what.”

“White? The idea! That gate has always been red. Well, why should I worry? I’m done with it all. You don’t worry over things when you’re listening for the footfalls of death, Jane. Shingling the barn, are they? I thought I heard hammering. That barn didn’t need shingling. But Silas was always extravagant when there’s no one to check him up.”

“It’s only the shingles that cost. The work won’t cost anything. Ding-dong and I are doing it.”

“I s’pose that’s why you’ve got your overalls on. Time was I couldn’t abide a girl in overalls. But what does it matter now? Only you shouldn’t go barefoot, Jane. You might get a rusty nail in your foot.”

“It’s easier getting round the roof with no shoes. And little Sid got a rusty nail in his foot yesterday although he had shoes on.”

“They never told me! I daresay they’ll let that child have blood-poisoning when I’m not round to look after him. He’s my favourite, too. Ah well, it won’t be long now … they know where I want to be buried … but they might have waited till I was dead to talk of grave-digging.”

“Oh, I’m sure it was the cow,” said Jane. “And I’m sure they’ll give you a lovely funeral. I think dad would write a beautiful obituary for you if I asked him.”

“Oh, all right, all right. That’s enough about it anyway. I don’t want to be buried till I AM dead. Did they give you a decent bite of dinner? Nettie is kind-hearted but she ain’t the best cook in the world. I was a good cook. Ah, the meals I’ve cooked in my time, Jane … the meals I’ve cooked!”

Jane missed an excellent opportunity to assure Aunt Elmira she would cook many more meals.

“The dinner was very nice, Aunt Elmira, and we had such fun at it. Ding-dong kept making speeches and we laughed and laughed.”

“They can laugh and me dying!” said Aunt Elmira bitterly. “And pussy-footing round in here with faces as long as to-day and to-morrow, pretending to be sorry. What was them dragging noises I’ve been hearing all the forenoon?”

“Mrs Bell and Brenda were rearranging the furniture in the parlour. I expect they are getting it ready for the wedding.”

“Wedding? Did you say wedding? Whose wedding?”

“Why, Brenda’s. She’s going to marry Jim Keyes. I thought you knew.”

“‘Course I knew they were going to be married sometime … but not with me dying. Do you mean to tell me they’re going ahead with it right off?”

“Well, you know it’s so unlucky to put a wedding off. It needn’t disturb you at all, Aunt Elmira. You’re up here in the ell all by yourself and …”

Aunt Elmira sat up in bed.

“You hand me my teeth,” she ordered. “They’re over there on the bureau. I’m going to eat my dinner and then I’m going to get up if it kills me. They needn’t think they’re going to sneak a wedding off me. I don’t care what the doctor says. I’ve never believed I was half as sick as he made out I was anyhow. Half the valuable stock on the place dying and children having blood-poisoning and red gates being painted white! It’s time somebody showed them!”

Hitherto Jane’s career at Lantern Hill had been quite unspectacular. Even when she was seen barefooted, nailing shingles on a barn roof, it made only a local sensation, and nobody but Mrs Solomon Snowbeam said much about it. Mrs Snowbeam was shocked. There was nothing, she said again, that child would stick at.

And then, all at once, Jane made the headlines. The Charlottetown papers gave her the front page for two days, and even the Toronto dailies gave her a column, with a picture of Jane and the lion … some lion … thrown in. The sensation at 60 Gay must be imagined. Grandmother was very bitter … “just like a circus girl” … and said it was exactly what might have been expected. Mother thought, but did not say, that no one could really have expected to hear of Jane ambling about P. E. Island leading lions by the mane.

There had been rumours about the lion for a couple of days. A small circus had come to Charlottetown and a whisper got about that their lion had escaped. Certainly people who went to the circus saw no lion. There was a good deal of excitement. Once a monkey had escaped from a circus, but what was that to a lion? It did not seem certain that any one had actually seen the lion, but several were reported to have seen him … here, there and the other place, miles apart. Calves and young pigs were said to have disappeared. There was even a yarn that a short-sighted old lady in the Royalty had patted him on the head and said, “Nice dogglums.” But that was never substantiated. The Royalty people indignantly denied that there were any lions at loose ends. Such yarns were bad for tourist traffic.

“I’ve no chance of seeing it,” said Mrs Louisa Lyons mournfully. “That’s what comes of being bed-rid. You miss everything.”

Mrs Louisa had been an invalid for three years and was reputed not to have put a foot under her without assistance in all that time, but it was not thought she missed much of what went on at the Corners and Queen’s Shore and Harbour Head for all that.

“I don’t believe there is any lion,” said Jane, who had been shopping at the Corners and had dropped in to see Mrs Lyons. Mrs Lyons was very fond of Jane and had only one grudge against her. She could never pick anything out of her about her father and mother and Lilian Morrow. And not for any lack of trying.

“Closer than a clam, that girl is when she wants to be,” complained Mrs Louisa.

“Then how did such a yarn start?” she demanded of Jane.

“Most people think the circus people never had a lion … or it died … and they want to cover it up because the people who came to see a lion would be disappointed and mad.”

“But they’ve offered a reward for it.”

“They’ve only offered twenty-five dollars. If they had really lost a lion, they’d offer more than that.”

“But it’s been SEEN.”

“I think folks just imagined they saw it,” said Jane.

“And I can’t even imagine it,” groaned Mrs Louisa. “And it’s no use to PRETEND I imagined it. Every one knows a lion wouldn’t come upstairs to my room. If I could see it, I’d likely have my name in the paper. Martha Tolling has had her name in the paper twice this year. Some people have all the luck.”

“Martha Tolling’s sister died in Summerside last week.”

“What did I tell you?” said Mrs Louisa in an aggrieved tone. “Now she’ll be wearing mourning. I never have a chanct to wear mourning. Nobody has died in our family for years. And black always did become me. Ah well, Jane, you have to take what you get in this world and that’s what I’ve always said. Thank you for dropping in. I’ve always said to Mattie, ‘There’s something about Jane Stuart I like, say what you will. If her father is queer, it isn’t her fault.’ Mind that turn of the stairs, Jane. I haven’t been down it for over a year but someone is going to break her neck there sometime.”

It happened the next day … a golden August afternoon when Jane and Polly and Shingle and Caraway and Punch and Min and Ding-dong and Penny and Young John had gone in a body to pick blueberries in the barrens at Harbour Head and were returning by a short cut across the back pastures of the Corners farms. In a little wood glen, full of golden-rod, where Martin Robbin’s old hay-barn stood, they met the lion face to face.

He was standing right before them among the golden-rod, in the shadows of the spruces. For one moment they all stood frozen in their tracks. Then, with a simultaneous yell of terror … Jane yelled with the best of them … they dropped their pails, bolted through the golden-rod and into the barn. The lion ambled after them. More yells. No time to close the ramshackle old door. They flew up a wobbly ladder which collapsed and fell as Young John scrambled to safety beside the others on the crossbeam, too much out of breath to yell again.

The lion came to the door, stood there a minute in the sunshine, slowly switching his tail back and forth. Jane, recovering her poise, noticed that he was somewhat mangy and lank, but he was imposing enough in the narrow doorway and nobody could reasonably deny that he was a lion.

“He’s coming in,” groaned Ding-dong.

“Can lions climb?” gasped Shingle.

“I … I … don’t think so,” said Polly, through her chattering teeth.

“Cats can … and lions are just big cats,” said Punch.

“Oh, don’t talk,” whispered Min. “It may excite him. Perhaps if we keep perfectly quiet he will go away.”

The lion did not seem to have any intention of going away. He came in, looked about him and lay down in a patch of sunshine with the air of a lion who had any amount of spare time.

“He don’t seem cross,” muttered Ding-dong.

“Maybe he isn’t hungry,” said Young John.

“Don’t excite him,” implored Min.

“He isn’t paying any attention to us,” said Jane. “We needn’t have run… . I don’t believe he’d have hurt us.”

“You run as fast as us,” said Penny Snowbeam. “I’ll bet you was as scared as any of us.”

“Of course I was. It was all so sudden. Young John, stop shaking like that. You’ll fall off the beam.”

“I’m … I’m … scared,” blubbered Young John shamelessly.

“You laughed at me last night and said I’d be scared to pass a patch of cabbages,” said Caraway venomously. “Now look at yourself.”

“None of your lip. A lion isn’t a cabbage,” whimpered Young John.

“Oh, you WILL excite him,” wailed Min in despair.

The lion suddenly yawned. Why, thought Jane, he looks exactly like that jolly old lion in the movie news. Jane shut her eyes.

“Is she praying?” whispered Ding-dong.

Jane was thinking. It was absolutely necessary for her to get home soon if she were going to have dad’s favourite scalloped potatoes for his supper. Young John was looking absolutely green. Suppose he got sick? She believed the lion was only a tired, harmless old animal. The circus people had said he was gentle as a lamb. Jane opened her eyes.

“I am going down to take that lion up to the Corners and shut him up in George Tanner’s empty barn,” she said. “That is, unless you’ll all come down with me and slip out and shut him up here.”

“Oh, Jane … you wouldn’t … you couldn’t …”

The lion gave a rap or two on the floor with his tail… . The protests died away in strangled yelps.

“I’m going,” said Jane. “I tell you, he’s tame as tame. But you stay here quietly till I get him well away. And don’t yell, any of you.”

With bulging eyes and bated breath the whole gang watched Jane slide along the beam to the wall where she climbed nimbly down to the floor. She marched up to the lion and said, “Come.”

The lion came.

Five minutes later Jake MacLean looked out of the door of his blacksmith shop and saw Jane Stuart go past leading a lion by the mane … “within spitting distance,” as he solemnly averred later. When Jane and the lion—who seemed to be getting on very well with each other—had disappeared around the back of the shop, Jake sat down on a block and wiped the perspiration from his brow with a bandanna.

“I know I’m not quite sane by times, but I didn’t think I was that far gone,” he said.

Julius Evans, looking out of his store-window, didn’t believe what he saw either. It couldn’t be … it simply wasn’t happening. He was dreaming … or drunk … or crazy. Aye, that was it … crazy. Hadn’t there been a year when his father’s cousin was in the asylum? Those things ran in families … you couldn’t deny it. Anything was easier than to believe that he had seen Jane Stuart go up the side-lane by his store towing a lion.

Mattie Lyons ran up to her mother’s room, uttering piteous little gasps and cries.

“What’s the matter?” demanded Mrs Louisa. “Screeching like you was demented!”

“Oh, ma, ma, Jane Stuart’s bringing a lion here!”

Mrs Louisa got out of bed and got to the window just in time to see the lion’s tail disappear with a switch around the back porch.

“I’ve got to see what she’s up to!” Leaving the distracted Mattie wringing her hands by the bed, Mrs Louisa got herself out of the room and down the staircase with its dangerous turn as nimbly as she had ever done in her best days. Mrs Parker Crosby, who lived next door and had a weak heart, nearly died of shock when she saw Mrs Louisa skipping across her back yard.

Mrs Louisa was just in time to see Jane and the lion ambling up Mr Tanner’s pasture on their way to the hay-barn. She stood there and watched Jane open the door … urge the lion in … shut it and bolt it. Then she sat down on the rhubarb patch, and Mattie had to get the neighbours to carry her back to bed.

Jane went into the store on her way back and asked Julius Evans, who was still leaning palely over the collection of fly-spotted jugs on his counter, to call Charlottetown and let the circus people know that their lion was safe in Mr Tanner’s barn. She found her dad in the kitchen at Lantern Hill looking rather strange.

“Jane, it’s the wreck of a fine man that you see before you,” he said hollowly.

“Dad … what is the matter?”

“Matter, says she, with not a quiver in her voice. You don’t know … I hope you never will know … what it is like to look casually out of a kitchen window, where you are discussing the shamefully low price of eggs with Mrs Davy Gardiner, and see your daughter … your only daughter … stepping high, wide and handsome through the landscape with a lion. You think you’ve suddenly gone mad … you wonder what was in that glass of raspberry shrub Mrs Gardiner gave you to drink. Poor Mrs Davy! As she remarked pathetically to me, the sight jarred her slats. She may get over it, Jane, but I fear she will never be the same woman again.”