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“Oh, I mean it.”

“Land sakes alive, I b’lieve you’re goin’ crazy!”

“I shouldn’t wonder if I was. I’ve had enough t’ drive an Indian crazy. Now you jest go off an’ leave me ‘lone. I ain’t no mind to visit,–they ain’t no way out of it’ and I’m tired o’ trying to find a way. Go off an’ let me be.”

Her tone was so bitterly hopeless that the great, jolly face of Mrs. Councill stiffened into a look of horror such as she had not known for years. The children, in two separate groups, could be heard rioting. Bees were humming around the clover in the grass, and the kingbird chattered ceaselessly from the Lombardy poplar tip. Both women felt all this peace and beauty of the morning dimly, and it disturbed Mrs. Councill because the other was so impassive under it all. At last, after a long and thoughtful pause, Mrs. Councill asked a question whose answer she knew would decide it all–asked it very kindly and softly:–

“Creeshy, are you comin’ in?”

“No,” was the short and sullenly decisive answer. Mrs. Councill knew that was the end, and so rose with a sigh, and went away.

“Wal, good-by,” she said, simply.

Looking back, she saw Lucretia lying at length, with closed eyes and hollow cheeks. She seemed to be sleeping, half buried in the grass. She did not look up nor reply to her sister-in-law, whose life was one of toil and trouble also, but not so hard and helpless as Lucretia’s. By contrast with most of her neighbors, she seemed comfortable.

“Sim Burns, what you ben doin’ to that woman?” she burst out, as she waddled up to where the two men were sitting under a cottonwood tree, talking and whittling after the manner of farmers.

“Nawthin’ ‘s fur ‘s I know,” answered Burns, not quite honestly, and looking uneasy.

“You needn’t try t’ git out of it like that, Sim Burns,” replied his sister. “That woman never got into that fit f’r nawthin‘.”

“Wal, if you know more about it than I do, whadgy ask me fur?” he replied, angrily.

“Tut, tut!” put in Councill, “hold y’r horses! Don’t git on y’r ear, children! Keep cool, and don’t spile y’r shirts. Most likely you’re all t’ blame. Keep cool an’ swear less.”

“Wal, I’ll bet Sim’s more to blame than she is. Why, they ain’t a harder-workin’ woman in the hull State of Ioway than she is–“

“Except Marm Councill.”

“Except nobody. Look at her, jest skin and bones.”

Councill chuckled in his vast way. “That’s so, mother; measured in that way, she leads over you. You git fat on it.”

She smiled a little, her indignation oozing away. She never “could stay mad,” her children were accustomed to tell her. Burns refused to talk any more about the matter, and the visitors gave it up, and got out their team and started for home, Mrs. Councill firing this parting shot:–

“The best thing you can do to-day is t’ let her alone. Mebbe the children ‘ll bring her round ag’in. If she does come round, you see ‘t you treat her a little more ‘s y’ did when you was a-courtin’ her.”

“This way,” roared Councill, putting his arm around his wife’s waist. She boxed his ears, while he guffawed and clucked at his team.

Burns took a measure of salt and went out into the pasture to salt the cows. On the sunlit slope of the field, where the cattle came running and bawling to meet him, he threw down the salt in handfuls, and then lay down to watch them as they eagerly licked it up, even gnawing a bare spot in the sod in their eagerness to get it all.

Burns was not a drinking man; he was hard-working, frugal; in fact, he had no extravagances except his tobacco. His clothes he wore until they all but dropped from him; and he worked in rain and mud, as well as dust and sun. It was this suffering and toiling all to no purpose that made him sour and irritable. He didn’t see why he should have so little after so much hard work.