He drew down his face to an injured expression. “That’s the way you treat a body, is it, when he comes to give you a friendly warning? All right, I’ll go now. I see I’m not wanted.”
He shifted his position as he spoke, and the next moment the pitchfork, on which he had been leaning, was thrust through the window, and as quickly withdrawn, with a doughnut sticking on every point. “Good-by, Kate,” he shouted, as he disappeared. “If the doughnuts don’t hold out, you can make some cookies for to-morrow.”
He had the best of it, and after a moment, apparently, even Kate forgave him, “the rascal,” as she called him, with a toss of her pretty head. And then the talk of the kitchen took a new turn, suggested by the thought of all the ills which would have followed if an accident had really happened to the machine. There had been such accidents in the experience of most of those present, and they were recounted now with much fulness of detail and some rivalry as to the amount of agony endured in the several cases by the workers in the culinary department.
“It’s the worst thing there is about threshing,” said the woman who had related the most harrowing tale of all. “I don’t care how many men there are, and I don’t mind cooking for ’em, and setting out the best I’ve got,—seems as if a body warn’t thankful for the crop if they don’t,—but when the machine gets out of order, and the work hangs on, and you have the men on your hands for three or four days running, just eating you out of house and home, and keeping you on the jump from morning to night, getting things on the table and off again, I tell you it’s something awful.”
There was no demur to this sentiment, but there was still another phase of distress to be mentioned.
“No,” said one of the others, “there ain’t anything quite as bad as that, but it’s the next thing to it to have the threshers come down on you without your having fair warning that they’re coming. I never will forget what a time we had last year. Abe had been telling me all along that they were going to stack the wheat and thresh in the fall, when one day, ’most sundown, up comes the threshing machine right into our barn lot. I told the men there must be some mistake, but they said, no, they’d just made a bargain with Abe, and were going to begin on our wheat in the morning. I tell you I was that mad I couldn’t see straight. Abe he tried to smooth it over, said he found the men had been thrown out at one place, and he thought he’d better close right in on ’em, and I needn’t to worry about the victuals—just give ’em what I had.”
She paused with an accent of inexpressible contempt, and covered her husband’s remarks on that point with the words, “You know how men talk! Why, even our side meat was most gone, and I hadn’t a single chicken frying size. Well, I tell you I didn’t let the grass grow under my feet nor under Abe’s neither. I made him hitch up and put himself into town the liveliest ever he did, and what with me sitting up most all night to brown coffee, and churn, and make pies, we somehow managed to put things through. I was plumb wore out when ’twas all over, but they do say the men bragged all the rest of the season on the dinner I gave ’em.”
Great applause followed this story, and an elderly woman remarked: “That’s one good thing about having the threshers. You’re sure to get your name up for a good cook if your victuals suit the men. I’ll warrant you’ll get a recommend after to-day, girls,” she said, with a nod at Kate and Esther. “And it ain’t a bad thing to have at your age,” she added, with a knowing wink.
Esther flushed, with a look of annoyance, but Kate responded gayly: “All right. Don’t any of you tell that they made the pies and doughnuts at home, and don’t you ever let it out that you fried the chickens, Mrs. Elwell.”
There was a sisterly resemblance between the two girls. Each was fair, with dark hair and eyes, but Esther was generally counted the prettier. She had a delicate, oval face, with soft, responsive eyes, and a color that came and went as easily as ripples in a wheat-field; the sort of face which, without the slightest coquetry of expression, was almost sure to hold and draw again the interested glance of those who met her. Kate’s was of the commoner type, and yet there was nothing too common in its strong, pleasant lines, or the straightforward frankness of her ready smile.