The event surrounding Miss Tutti and Miss Fruitti is discussed in Chapter 27. Their names are actually Sarah and Frances Barber, but because they are Yankees who moved to Maycomb, Republicans, sisters and deaf old maids, they become the brunt of local jokes. Also, the two deaf sisters built a cellar, the only one in Maycomb, and they brag about it too much. So some local children decided to play a trick on Miss Tutti and Miss Frutti after the sisters fell asleep. The kids walked into their unlocked home and moved all the furniture down to the cellar.
Sheriff Tate was called in the next morning, of course. The sisters declared that they heard Syrians run off with their furniture and demanded that the dogs be summoned to round up the perpetrators. As a result, the children of the town, who normally run around barefoot, all wore their shoes that day as a way to throw the hounds off their scents. The children must have all been barefoot on the night that they moved the furniture down to the cellar, so that wearing shoes would cover up their foot odor and trick the hounds. Scout recounts the following:
"By noontime that day, there was not a barefooted child to be seen in Maycomb and nobody took off his shoes until the hounds were returned" (252).
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