FullReads

“She never has been to see me since that day, and–but I hoped she’d come and see me, but she never sent me any invitation to her wedding.” She choked with sobs at the memory of it.

Mrs. Gray realized the enormity of the offence, and she could only put her arms around Emma’s back and say, “There, there, I wouldn’t take on so about it.” As a matter of fact, she had striven to have Bill send an invitation to his brother-in-law, but Bill was inflexible on that point. With the sound of the stolen cow-bell ringing in his ears, he could not bring himself to ask Ike Harkey into his house.

After Emma grew a little calmer, Mrs. Gray tried again to bridge the chasm. “Now, I just believe if you would go to Sarah–“

“I can’t do that! She’d slam the door in my face. Jim’s wife says Sarah said I shouldn’t pick a single currant out of the garden this year!”

“I don’t go much on what Jim’s wife says,” put in Mrs. Gray, guardedly. She had begun to feel that Jim’s wife was the main disturbing element.

The sisters really suffered from their separation. They had been so used to running in at all times of the day that each missed the other wofully. It had been their habit whenever they needed each other to help cook, or cut a dress, to hang a cloth out of the chamber window, a sign which was sure to bring help post-haste; but now nothing would induce either of them to make the first concession.

Two or three times when Emma, feeling especially lonely, was on the point of hanging out the signal, she was prevented by the thought of some cruel message Mrs. Jim had brought. Jim lived on Ike’s farm in a small house that had been Emma’s first home, and Mrs. Jim was almost as much in her house as in her own. She had no children, and was a mischief-maker, not so much from ill will as from a love of dramatic situations; it was her life, this dramatic play of loves and hates among her friends and neighbors.

Emma feared her husband, too; he was so self-contained, and so inexorably moral, at least in appearance. He sweetly said he bore no ill will toward the Grays, but he must insist that his wife should not visit them until they apologized. He took the matter very serenely, however.

The sound of the cow-bell was a constant daily irritation to Bill; he was slow to wrath, but the bell seemed to rasp on his tenderest nerve; it had a curiously exultant sound heard in the early morning–it seemed to voice Harkey’s triumph. Bill’s friends were astonished at the change in him. He grew dark and thunderous with wrath whenever Harkey’s name was mentioned.

One day Ike’s cattle broke out of the pasture into Bill’s young oats, and though Ike hurried after them, it seemed to Bill he might have got them out a little quicker than he did. He said nothing then, however, but when a few days later they broke in again, he went over there in very bad humor.

“I want this thing stopped,” he said.

Ike was mending the fence. He smiled in his sweet way, and said smoothly, “I’m sorry, but when they once git a taste of grain it’s pretty hard to keep ’em–“

“Well, there ought to be a new fence here,” said Bill. “That fence is as rotten as a pumpkin.”

“I s’pose they had; yes, sir, that’s so,” Harkey assented quickly. “I’m ready to build my half, you know,” he said, “any time–any time you are.”

“Well, I’ll build mine to-morrow,” said Bill. “I can’t have your cattle pasturing on my oats.”

“All right, all right. I’ll have mine done as quick as yourn.”

“Well, see’t you do; I don’t want my grain all tramped into the ground and I ain’t a-goin’ to have it.”