Kate shook her head. “Esther isn’t her sort of person at all,” she said. “Aunt Katharine would take somebody that’s strong-minded like herself if she wanted a follower in those things.”
Tom flicked a kernel of corn at a swallow that swooped down from a beam above his head, and remarked carelessly, “Maybe strong-minded folks had rather have those that ain’t so strong-minded to work on.”
There was something in this that gave a passing uneasiness to the look in Kate’s black eyes. She was silent a moment, then said with emphasis, “Well, I’ll risk Esther Northmore;” and a minute later, oddly enough, she was talking of Morton Elwell, and wondering what he found to do now that wheat harvest and haying were over at home.
“If he’s out of a job I wish he’d come round this way,” observed Tom. “We need another hand in our meadow, and we’d set him to work right off.”
“And supply him with a scythe to work with, I suppose,” said Kate, scornfully. “I imagine Mort Elwell! He rides a mowing machine when he cuts grass.”
“Well, he couldn’t ride it in our meadow,” retorted Tom. “There isn’t a Hoosier on top of the ground that could do it. I don’t care how smart he is.” (He had been tantalized at frequent intervals ever since Kate’s coming by accounts of Morton Elwell’s smartness.) “A scythe is the only thing that’ll work in a place like that.”
“Out our way they wouldn’t have such a place,” said Kate, loftily. “They’d put in tile and drain it, if they were going to use the ground at all.”
“A nice job they’d have of it,” grunted Tom; and then he remarked incidentally: “I heard Esther tell Stella the other day that our meadow was the prettiest place she ever saw. They were sitting by the brook, and she said it made her sick to think how your creek at home looked, all so brown and muddy.”
This was a manifest digression, but Tom had a genius for that, and a quotation from Esther bearing on the attractions of New England was a missile he never failed to use, when it came to his hand in discussion with Kate. She looked annoyed for a minute. There was no denying that the creek at home was a sorry-looking stream beside that beautiful meadow brook, with its clear pebbly bottom. But she recovered herself in another moment.
“Oh, your brook is pretty, of course,” she said graciously, “but it’s all in the way you look at it. For my part I don’t mind having a good rich brown in the color of ours. It shows that the land isn’t all rocks; that there’s something in it soft enough to wash down.”