He snatched up the blackberries, a pail in each hand, and stood looking helplessly around him, for he could not decide which way to go.
In front of him stretched half a mile of the haunted thicket.

It was either to push his way through that as quickly as possible, or to go back by the long, lonesome road over which he had come.
Just then a harmless flock of geese belonging to an old market-gardener who lived near came waddling up from the creek, on the way home to their barn-yard.

They moved along in a silent procession, pushing their long, thin necks through the underbrush.

John Jay was too terrified to see that their heads were properly in place, and that they were as harmless as the flock that fed in Aunt Susan's dooryard.
"They'll get me! They'll get me!" he whimpered, as they came nearer and nearer, for his feet seemed so heavy that he could not lift them when he tried to run.

Made desperate by his fear, he raised first one pail of berries and then the other, hurling them at the startled geese with all the force his wiry little arms could muster.
Instantly their long white wings shot up through the bushes.