e was a lank, colourless
girl, with bad teeth and small pale eyes. Jubal, at the churn in the
hall, rested from his labours as Nicholas entered, and grinned as he
pointed to his mother in the kitchen. Marthy Burr was ironing. As
Nicholas crossed the threshold, she stopped in her passage from the
stove and looked at him, a flash of pride softening her pain-scarred
features.

"Lord, what a man you are, Nick!" she exclaimed with a kind of triumph.
"When I heard yo' step on the po'ch I could have swo'ed it was yo'
pa's."

Nicholas nodded at her abstractedly as he took off his hat.

"Where's pa?" he asked carelessly. "I thought he'd have got in before
me. I saw him as I came up."

"I reckon he won't git in befo' he gits a drench-in'," responded his
stepmother, glancing indifferently through the back window. "If he does
it'll be the first time sence he war born. 'Twarn't nothin' to be done
in the fields, nohow, an' so I told him, but he ain't never rested yet,
an' I don't reckon he's goin' to till I bury him."

As she spoke the rain fell heavily, and presently Amos Burr came in,
shaking the water from his head and shoulders.

"I told you 'twarn't no use yo' goin' to the fields befo' the rain,"
began his wife admonishingly. "But you're a man all over, an' it seems
like you're 'bliged to go yo' own way for the sheer pleasure of goin'
agin somebody else's. If I'd been pesterin' you all day long to go down
thar to look at that ploughin', you'd be settin' in yo' chair now, plum
dry."

Amos Burr crossed to the stove and turned his dripping back to the heat.

"Gimme a rubbin' down, Sairy Jane," he pleaded, and his daughter took a
dry cloth and began mopping off the water.

Marthy Burr placed an iron on the stove and took one off.

"Whar'd you git dinner, Nick?" she inquired suddenly.

"At the judge's."

"What did they have?" demanded Jubal from the hall, ceasing the clatter
of the churn. "Golly! Wouldn't I like a bite of something!"

"I shouldn't mind some strange cookin', myself," said Marthy Burr,
shaking her head at one of the children who had come into the kitchen
with muddy feet. "I ain't tasted anybody else's vittles for ten years,
an' sometimes I feel my mouth waterin' for a change of hand in the
dough."

She took one of her husband's shirts from the pile of freshly dried
clothes, spread it on the ironing-board, and sprinkled it with water.
Then she moistened her finger and applied it to the iron.

Amos Bu