"How you gettin' 'long, Pell? My second bucket's full, an' Susie's almost finished."
He would reluctantly carry his weeds to the pile, and go back to the work and his dreaming.
He was a problem to his energetic father. He would start industriously enough, but the day's toll always fell far below what was expected. The parents had many conferences over him.
"I don't know what to make of the boy, Mary. I never used to loaf like Pelham does. He's as bad as a nigger."
"He's only a boy, Paul."
"He's got to learn to work."
The mother sighed.
The son received ten cents a week for keeping the bedrooms supplied with coal. Several nights he had been routed out of bed, and made to stumble down to the coalhouse, while his father impatiently held the lantern, to do the neglected task. He was perpetually losing things. Hammers, saws, dewed in the morning grass, a saddle that he had forgotten to hang up,—these would furnish damning indictments of his carefulness.
To teach him responsibility, the three newly-purchased crates of Leghorns were put in his charge. Many a time a dried water-trough or a suspiciously pecked-up chicken-run, its last grain of corn consumed, brought him into trouble. Perhaps he had spent the afternoon whittling a dagger, or carefully cleaning an old horse-skull discovered under the green valley pines. He was very proud at the idea of possessing the chickens, and grew fond of them; but remembering to attend to them was a very different matter.
"I don't never have any time for myself, mother," he would complain, after a scene with Paul. "The Highland boys don't have to work all the time."