It was a typical summer Sunday at Kimbro Cleaverage's, and did its part at explaining the always cruelly straitened means of the household. Boys were pitching horseshoes in the open space beyond the barn, uncertain whether or not to quit on account of the preacher. The hot, white dust lay in the road; the hot, clear air brooded above the tree-tops.
Inside the house, the women in the kitchen compared quilt patterns and talked chickens, combining much gossip with the dinner getting.
Finally it became unbearable to Callista to feel that her affairs were being more or less covertly inspected from all the 226 different angles and points of view possible to the visitors. Passing through the kitchen, she possessed herself of the water bucket and slipped off down to the far spring. People did not often bring water from this place. Its clear, cool trickle had a medicinal tang, and there was red iron-rust around the edges of its basin. She sat down in the spring hollow on the cool moss with big ferns coming up about her. Remembrance was strong within her of that black, raw morning in April when she had lingered desperately here, and she looked long at the Judas tree beneath which she had stood.
The alders raised a tent over the basin, a tenderly shadowed dome, through the midst of which the little-used spring-path made a bright green vista like a pleached alley. And down this way she was presently aware of Sylvane walking, his head thrown back, his clear whistle coming to her before she got the sound of his feet. She shivered a little. The tune he whistled had in it reminiscences of Lance's "How many years, how many miles?"
"You here, Callisty?" asked the boy, parting the branches, and finally coming shyly closer to seat himself on the bank below her.
"I wanted to get shut of all the folks," she said, her brooding eyes on the ground at her feet. "Oh, not you, Sylvane—the rest of them talk so much."
The boy smiled uncertainly.
"Well, I—reckon I was aimin' to sorter talk, too, Callisty," he 227 began timidly. "I 'lowed to tell you about that place where Lance is a-workin'. Hit's been some time now, an' I ain't never said nothin' to ye—I didn't want to pester ye."
Poor Sylvane was trying, in the mountain phrase, "to make fine weather, an' hit a-rainin'." She made no movement to hush him, and he even thought she listened with some eagerness.
"They," he began with hesitation, watching her face, "they're a-gettin' out railroad ties now. That makes the work mighty heavy. It takes Lance and Bob and Andy to run the mill—and sometimes they have to have help. They've got generally as many as eight or ten loggers and woodsmen. They just get the logs up any way they can. Last week Lance got his foot hurt in a log bunk that he fixed up on the running gears of two wagons. They wanted me to come and drive. They do a lot of snaking out the logs without any wagon at all. Reelfoot Dawson is the best teamster they've got. That yoke of steers he has can snake logs out of places where a team of mules or horses couldn't so much as get in."