"When the first green breaks through, and you may break the soil without offense, you will do well," Kazunzumi said. "You are a man who loves the land."
"My fathers have flourished with the soil for twenty generations," the Amishman said. "I pray another twenty may live to inherit my good fortune."
"Haruna," the Sarki said, "I see that you are a man of the book, that volume of which Mother in her grace turns over a fresh page each spring. Though your skin is as pale as the flesh of my palm, though you have but one wife, though you speak throat-deep and strangely, yet you and I are more alike than different. The Mother has given you light, Haruna, her greatest gift."
"I thank the Sarki for his words," Aaron said. "Sir, my good and only wife—I am a poor man, and bound by another law than that of the fortunate Kazunzumi—adds her thanks to mine for the rich gifts the Chief of Datura presented us, his servants. In simple thanks, I have some poor things to tender our benefactor."
Waziri, perceiving the tenor of Aaron's talk, sprang to his feet and hastened out to the wagon for the bundles he'd seen under the seat. He returned, staggering under a seventy-pound bale of long-leaf tobacco, product of Aaron's father's farm. He went back for a bolt of scarlet silk for the Sarki's paramount wife, and strings of candy for the great man's children. He puffed in with one last brown-wrapped parcel, which he unpacked to display a leather saddle. This confection was embossed with a hundred intricate designs, rich with silver; un-Amish as a Christmas tree. Judging from the Sarki's dazzled thanks, the saddle was just the thing for a Murnan Chief.
As soon as Kazunzumi had delivered his pyrotechnic speech of thanks, and had directed that Aaron's gifts be placed on a velvet-draped dais at the end of the room, a roast kid was brought in. Waziri, half drunk with the elegance of it all, fell to like any other adolescent boy, and was soon grease to the armpits. Aaron, more careful, referred his actions to the Sarki's. The bread must be broken, not cut; and it was eaten with the right hand only, the left lying in the lap as though broken. Belching seemed to be de rigueur as a tribute to the cuisine, so Aaron belched his stomach flat.
Business could now be discussed. Aaron, having no pencil, traced with a greasy finger on the tile floor the outlines of the barn and farmhouse he envisaged. The Sarki from time to time demanded of young Waziri such facts as a carpenter's son might be expected to know, and added lumber-prices in his head as Aaron's bank-barn and two-story farmhouse took form in his imagination. Finally he told the Amishman what the two buildings would cost. Better pleased by this figure than he'd expected to be, Aaron initiated the long-drawn ceremony required to discharge himself from Kazunzumi's hospitality.
As the Stoltzfoos wagon jolted out the gate of Datura, bearing the cot and clothes trunk of Waziri together with the owner of those chattels, the boys who'd jeered before now stared with respect. The black-hatted Turawa had been to visit the Sarki; this established him as no safe man to mock. Waziri gave his late playmates no notice beyond sitting rather straighter on the wagon seat than was comfortable.