"The poet who writes of milking the cows does it from the hammock, looking on," Howard soliloquized as he watched the old man Lewis racing around the filthy yard after one of the young heifers that had kicked over the pail in her agony with the flies and was unwilling to stand still and be eaten alive.
"So, so! you beast!" roared the old man as he finally cornered the shrinking, nearly frantic creature.
"Don't you want to look at the garden?" asked Mrs. McLane of Howard; and they went out among the vegetables and berries.
The bees were coming home heavily laden and crawling slowly into the hives. The level, red light streamed through the trees, blazed along the grass, and lighted a few old-fashioned flowers into red ai~d gold flame. It was beautiful, and Howard looked at it through his half-shut eyes as the painters do, and turned away with a sigh at the sound of blows where the wet and grimy men were assailing the frantic cows.
"There's Wesley with your trunk," Mrs. McLane said, recalling him to himself.
Wesley helped him carry the trunk in and waved off thanks.
"Oh, that's all right," he said; and Howard knew the Western man too well to press the matter of pay.
As he went in an hour later and stood by the trunk, the dull ache came back into his heart. How he had failed! It seemed like a bitter mockery now to show his gifts.
Grant had come in from his work, and with his feet released from his chafing boots, in his wet shirt and milk-splashed overalls, sat at the kitchen table reading a newspaper which he held close to a small kerosene lamp. He paid no attention to anyone. His attitude, Curiously like his father's, was perfectly definite to Howard. It meant that from that time forward there were to be no words of any sort between them. It meant that they were no longer brothers, not even acquaintances. "How inexorable that face!" thought Howard.
He turned sick with disgust and despair, and would have closed his trunk without showing any of the presents, only for the childish expectancy of his mother and Laura.
"Here's something for you, Mother," he said, assuming a cheerful voice as he took a fold of fine silk from the trunk and held it up.
"All the way from Paris."
He laid it on his mother's lap and stooped and kissed her, and then turned hastily away to hide the tears that came to his own eyes as he saw her keen pleasure.
"And here's a parasol for Laura. I don't know how I came to have that in here. And here's General Grant's autobiography for his namesake," he said with an effort at carelessness, and waited to hear Grant rise.
"Grant, won't you come in?" asked his mother quiveringly.
Grant did not reply nor move. Laura took the handsome volumes out and laid them beside him on the table. He simply pushed them to one side and went on with his reading.
Again that horrible anger swept hot as flame over Howard. He could have cursed him. His hands shook as he handed out other presents to his mother and Laura and the baby. He tried to joke.
"I didn't know how old the baby was, so she'll have to grow to some of these things."
But the pleasure was all gone for him and for the rest. His heart swelled almost to a feeling of pain as he looked at his mother.
There she sat with the presents in her lap. The shining silk came too late for her. It threw into appalling relief her age, her poverty, her work-weary frame. "My God!" he almost cried aloud, "how little it would have taken to lighten her life!"
Upon this moment, when it seemed as if he could endure no more, came the smooth voice of William McTurg:
"Hello, folkses!"
"Hello, Uncle Bill! Come in."
"That's what we came for," laughed a woman's voice.
"Is that you, Rose?" asked Laura.
"It's me-Rose," replied the laughing girl as she bounced into the room and greeted everybody in a breathless sort of way.
"You don't mean little Rosy?"
"Big Rosy now," said William.
Howard looked at the handsome girl and smiled, saying in a nasal sort of tone, "Wal, wal! Rosy, how you've growed since I saw yeh!"
"Oh, look at all this purple and fine linen! Am I left out?"
Rose was a large girl of twenty-five or thereabouts, and was called an old maid. She radiated good nature from every line of her buxom self. Her black eyes were full of drollery, and she was on the best of terms with Howard at once. She had been a teacher, but that did not prevent her from assuming a peculiar directness of speech. Of course they talked about old friends.
"Where's Rachel?" Howard inquired. Her smile faded away.
"Shellie married Orrin Mcllvaine. They're way out in Dakota.
Shellie's havin' a hard row of stumps."
There was a little silence.
"And Tommy?"
"Gone West. Most all the boys have gone West. That's the reason there's so many old maids."
"You don't mean to say-"
"I don't need to say-I'm an old maid. Lots of the girls are."
"It don't pay to marry these days."
"Are you married?"
"Not yet." His eyes lighted up again in a humorous way.
"Not yet! That's good! That's the way old maids all talk."
"You don't mean to tell me that no young fellow comes prowling around-"
"Oh, a young Dutchrnan or Norwegian once in a while. Nobody that counts. Fact is, we're getting like Boston-four women to one man; and when you consider that we're getting more particular each year, the outlook is-well, it's dreadful!"
"It certainly is."
"Marriage is a failure these days for most of us. We can't live on the farm, and can't get a living in the city, and there we are." She laid her hand on his arm. "I declare, Howard, you're the same boy you used to be. I ain't a bit afraid of you, for all your success."
"And you're the same girl? No, I can't say that. It seems to me you've grown more than I have-I don't mean physically, I mean mentally," he explained as he saw her smile in the defensive way a fleshy girl has, alert to ward off a joke.
They were in the midst of talk, Howard telling one of his funny stories, when a wagon clattered up to the door and merry voices called loudly:
"Whoa, there, Sampson!"
"Hullo, the house!"
Rose looked at her father with a smile in her black eyes exactly like his. They went to the door.
"Hullo! What's wanted?"
