Shad said knowing the proper time to pick huckleberries was just born in one, so the girls had guarded the old pasture from any marauding youngsters or wayside peddlers.
"You've got to keep a good eye out for them this year," Shad warned them.
"Last year wasn't good for huckleberries, apples or nuts, but this is going to be a regular jubilee harvest.

Them bushes up there are hanging so full that you can put up quarts and quarts and quarts of them and send huckleberry pies to the heathen all winter if you want to." And he had likewise warned them that that particular berry patch had been famous throughout the countryside ever since the days when Greenacres had belonged to the Trowbridges.

Several times when it had happened to be a good year for the huckleberry crop, raiders had swept down and culled the best of the harvest.

Not from around the near-by villages had they come, but from the small towns, ten or fifteen miles away.
"Them mill boys and girls," Shad declared, "just think that the Lord grows things in the country for anybody to come along and pick.

They don't pay no more attention to a 'No Trespassing' sign than they would to a woodchuck's tracks.