FullReads

"Well, by jinks! if it ain’t Julia! Just the one I wanted to see!"

The girl turned, saw a pleasant-faced young fellow in a derby hat and a fifteen-dollar suit of diagonals.

"Rod Rodemaker! How come–"

She remembered her situation, and flushed, looked down at the water, and remained perfectly still.

"Ain’t ye goin’ to shake hands? Y’ don’t seem very glad t’ see me. "

She began to grow angry. "If you had any eyes you’d see!"

Rob looked over th
e edge of the bank, whistled, turned away. "Oh, I see! Excuse me! Don’t blame yeh a bit, though. Good weather f’r corn," he went on’ looking up at the trees.’Corn seems to be pretty well forward," he continued in a louder voice as he walked away, still gazing into the air. "Crops is looking first-class in Boomtown. Hello! This Otto? H’yare y’ little scamp! Get onto that horse agin. Quick, ‘r I’ll take y’r skin off an, hang it on the fence. what y’ been doing?"

"Ben in swimmm’. Jimminy, ain’t it fun! when ‘d y’ get back?" said the boy, grinning.

"Never you mind," replied Rob, leaping the fence by laying his left hand on the top rail. "Get onto that horse. " He tossed the boy up on the horse, hung his coat on the fence. "I s’pose the ol’ man makes her plow same as usual?"

"Yup," said Otto.

"Dod ding a man that’ll do that! I don’t mind if it’s necessary, but it ain’t necessary m his case. " He continued to mutter in this way as he went across to the other side of the field. As they turned to come back, Rob went up and looked at the horse’s mouth. "Gettin’ purty near of age. Say, who’s sparkin’ Julia now–anybody?"

"Nobody ‘cept some ol’ Norwegians. She won’t have them. Por wants her to, but she won’t. "

"Good f’r her. Nobody comes t’ see her Sunday nights, eh?"

"Nope, only ‘Tias Anderson an’ Ole Hoover; but she goes off an’ leaves ’em. "

"Chk!" said Rob, starting old Jack across the field.

It was almost noon, and Jack moved reluctantly. He knew the time of day as well as the boy. He made this round after distinct protest.

In the meantime Julia, putting on her shoes and stockings, went to the fence and watched the man’s shining white shirt as he moved across the cornfield. There had never been any special tenderness between them, but she had always liked him. They had been at school together. She wondered why he had come back at this time of the year, and wondered how long he would stay. How long had he stood looking at her? She flushed again at the thought of it. But he wasn’t to blame; it was a public road. She might have known better.

She stood under a little popple tree, whose leaves shook musically at every zephyr, and her eyes through half-shut lids roved over the sea of deep-green glossy leaves, dappled here and there by cloud-shadows, stirred here and there like water by the wind, and out of it all a longing to be free from such toil rose like a breath, filling her throat, and quickening the motion of her heart. Must this go on forever, this life of heat and dust and labor? what did it all mean?

The girl laid her chin on her strong red wrists, and looked up into the blue spaces between the vast clouds–aerial mountains dissolving in a shoreless azure sea. How cool and sweet and restful they looked! li she might only lie out on the billowy, snow-white, sunlit edge! The voices of the driver and the plowman recalled her, and she fixed her eyes again upon the slowly nodding head of the patient horse, on the boy turned half about on the horse, talking to the white-sleeved man, whose derby hat bobbed up and down quite curiously, like the horse’s head. Would she ask him to dinner? what would her people say?