“It’s warm to-night,” she told him. “Summer’s about here.”
He nodded. “We’ll have green peas by the Fourth if we don’t git a frost.”
Neither of them wanted to get at once to the house. There was youth in them; the house was no place for youth. She was Ruth MacLure, Mary Evered’s sister. Not, by that token, John Evered’s aunt; for John Evered’s mother was dead many years gone, before Evered took Mary MacLure for wife. A year ago old Bill MacLure had died and Ruth had come to live with her sister. John had never known her till then; since then he found it impossible to understand how he had ever lived without knowing her. She was years younger than her sister, three years younger than John Evered himself; and he loved her.
They crossed the barnyard to the fence and looked down into the shadowy pit of blackness where the swamp lay, half a mile below them. They rested their elbows on the top bar of the fence. Once or twice the bull muttered in his stall a few rods away. They could hear the champ of the horse’s teeth as the beast fed before sleeping; they could hear Evered’s cows stirring in their tie-up. The night was very still and warm, as though heaven brooded like a mother over the earth.
The girl said at last, “Semler was here while you were gone.”
The young man asked slowly, “What fetched him here?”
“He was on his way home from fishing, down in the swamp stream.”
“Did he do anything down there?”
“Had seventeen. One of them was thirteen inches long. He wanted to leave some, but Mary wouldn’t let him.”
They were silent for a moment, then John Evered said, “Best not tell my father.”