"Hit don't make no differ so long as Cousin Lance won't be thar," she announced wisely. "Cousin Lance always did make game of Flent. He said that when Flent took up a collection in 163 church, he hollered 'amen' awful loud to keep folks from noticin' that he didn't put nothin' in the hat hisse'f. I wish't Lance was comin' 'long of us."
With this the two of them dipped into the gay, rustling gloom of the autumn-tinted gulch, with Lance's Laurel reduced to a tiny trickle between clear little pools, gurgling faintly in the bottom.
Before they came to the Cleaverage place they heard the noise of the sorghum making. A team was coming in from the field with a belated load of the stalks, which should have been piled in place yesterday; Ellen Hands and Little Liza appeared down the lane carrying between them a jug swung from a stick—everybody that comes to help takes toll.
When Callista arrived, half-a-dozen were busy over the work; Hands feeding the crusher, Sylvane waiting on him with bundles of the heavy, rich green stalks, and Buck Fuson driving the solemn old horse his jogging round, followed by fat little Mary Ann Martha, capering along with a stick in her hand, imitating his every movement and shout.
The rollers set on end which crushed the jade-green stalks were simply two peeled hardwood logs. Flenton had threatened for years to bring in a steel crusher; but, up to the present, the machine his grandfather made had been found profitable. The absinthe-colored juice ran down its little trough into a barrel, 164 whence it was dipped to the evaporating pan, about which centered the hottest of the fray. In the stone furnace under this great, shallow pan—as long and broad, almost, as a wagon-bed—old Kimbro himself was keeping a judgmatic fire going. Roxy Griever, qualified by experience with soap and apple-butter, circled the fire and kept up a continual skimming of froth from the bubbling juice, while she did not lack for advice to her father concerning his management of the fire.
Flenton handed over to Fuson his work at the crusher, calling Polly to mind the horse, and came straight to Callista.
"I'm mighty proud to see that you don't feel obliged to stay away from a place becaze I'm thar," he said in a lowered tone, and she fancied a flicker of fear in his eyes, as though he questioned whether her husband might be expected to follow.
"Lance was a-goin' down to the Settlement to-day," she said bluntly, "and I'd have been all alone anyhow; so I 'lowed I might as well come over."
Hands looked relieved.
"I hope you ain't a-goin' to hold it against me, Callisty," he went on in a hurried half whisper, "that Lance is namin' it all around that this here scope o' country ain't big enough to hold him and me."