With so many to help, the preparations for dinner could not but move briskly. At sharp twelve o’clock the farm bell, mounted on a hickory post at the corner of the house, rang out its invitation, and almost instantly the engine stopped puffing, the whir of labor in the fields slackened, and the men had turned their faces toward the house. They were not a company of common laborers. Many of them were well-to-do farmers, who gave their services here in repayment or anticipation of similar aid in their own time of need. Most of them knew the Northmore girls, and had a friendly greeting for Kate as they passed her, standing by the swinging bell.
“Well, Miss Kate,” said one of them, a tall, angular man, who, in spite of his office in the district as the New Light preacher, was one of the most active workers, “I’ll wager you never rang a bell before for such a hard-looking crowd. We’re ‘knaves that smell of sweat.’ But there’s folks that look better in worse business, and I reckon you don’t mind the looks of us as long as we behave ourselves. How many do you want at once? I s’pose we can’t all sit down at the first table.”
“Well, then,” broke in a hearty young farmer, with a twinkle in his eyes, “I move that the preacher goes in with the last crowd. We don’t any of us want to run our chances after he gets through.”
“Oh,” said the preacher, good-naturedly, “I was calculating to wait, anyhow. Shan’t have any scruples then against taking the last piece.”
“Well, I’ll engage that the last piece shall lie as good as the first,” said Kate; “but we can’t give more than ten of you elbow-room at once. I might count ‘Eeny, meny, miny, mo,’ to see which of you shall come in now, but there’s a pan of corn-bread in the oven that I’m watching, and I think you’d better settle it yourselves.”
Apparently there was no difficulty, for in an extraordinarily short space of time the toilets made at the well were finished, and the dinner was furnished with guests. Loaded as the table was with good things, it might have seemed part of a Thanksgiving scene but that the holiday air was quite wanting to the men who sat around it. There was not much conversation. Some observations on crops and the price of wheat, or an occasional bit of good-natured raillery, filled the infrequent pauses in the business of eating, but the latter was carried on with a heartiness which spoke well for those who had spread the feast.
Outside, however, in the shadow of the great beech by the kitchen door, there was a waiting group who found time for talking, and the preacher, whose long, lank figure was stretched in the midst, was easily taking the leading part. Some remark had evidently started him on a train of reminiscences, and his mellow, half-drawling tones floated through the kitchen door, and mingled with the clatter of the dishes.
“Yes, there’s been a heap o’ change in this country since I came here twenty years ago. ’Twas pretty much all timber through here then, and there warn’t a foot o’ tile in this end o’ the county. I hired out to old Jim Rader. He was just clearing up his farm. Lord, he used to have me up by four o’clock in the morning, grubbing stumps, with the fog so thick you couldn’t tell stump from fog before you.”
“I reckon you made the acquaintance of the ager ’bout that time,” observed one of the group as the preacher paused.
“Ague!” repeated the other, raising himself on his elbow and eying the speaker. “Wall, I reckon! If there’s any kind I didn’t get on speaking terms with, I’d like to know the name of it. I’ve had the third-day ague, and the seventh-day ague, the shaking ague, and the dumb ague—though why ’twas ever called ‘dumb’ beats me. If there’s anything calculated to make a man open his mouth and express his mind freely on the way things go in this neck o’ wilderness, it’s that particular kind. Lord! My bones have ached so, I’d have given any man a black eye that said there was only two hundred of ’em. However, I got shet of it at last, taking quinine. Reckon this country couldn’t have been settled up without quinine, and I stayed with Rader two years and helped him break in the land. Didn’t like the business much, but I had a notion in my head that I wanted to make a preacher of myself, and I didn’t quit till I had the means to do it. Didn’t get over-much schooling, but I wouldn’t take a heap for what I did get. Mort!” he exclaimed, turning abruptly to the young man at his side, “how have you been getting on at college? They say you’re going to stick right to it.”