Wiggie looked in over the heads of the pleased crowd.
“Harriet, I’d be awfully obliged if you could persuade Geronimo to come out of the duck-pond! And I rather believe that Stubbs has emptied the Little Great Quetta out of the bath-chair.”
Harriet flew, nearly annihilating the examiner. Wiggie met Lanty’s eyes with the smile that he had already seen on another pair of lips.
“Oh, nothing dangerous! Come out and talk, will you, when business is over? Isn’t this jolly? I don’t care what Harriet says. I should like to eat all that butter myself!”
He moved away, followed by looks of passionate gratitude from the disheartened competitors, and Lanty mounted the platform.
“Seen Dandy Anne?” Hamer asked him in a loud whisper, when he had shaken hands all round, and found a chair. Grumphy crawled from under the table, and snored against his knee. Hamer laughed with suppressed jollity.
“She’s making butter!” he announced in a joyful undertone. “Insisted on having a shot at seeing what she could make out. Taken all the ten lessons, as serious as seven Sundays all in a lump! Our Dandy Anne! Funny, isn’t it?—though you needn’t say I said so. I hope she’ll pull through all right. Mother here’ll be sadly vexed if she comes out with a duck-egg!”
He pointed surreptitiously, and, looking along the lines of farmers’ daughters, running his eye from faces he knew personally to others whose parentage was easily placed, Lanty found Dandy at last no more than two churns away.
She looked extraordinarily serious, as Hamer had said, and not only serious but anxious; not only anxious but even—just a little—dishevelled. Her butter had been a long time in coming, and though she had it on the worker by now, it would be a race to finish it. She had seen Lanty when his head first topped the hill, and after that she had done everything wrong, forgotten her plug, made a thorough hash of lifting out the butter and had then over-salted it, so that the marks against her were totting up like a washing-bill, to the distress of the examiner, who admired her exceedingly. That poor four pounds was worked and overworked until it didn’t know itself, and was received for weighing with grunted contempt. With flushed cheeks and escaping hair, Dandy took it back to finish, and tried to console herself with a perfectly-executed pattern. Lanty watched her with interest, and decided that he liked her—just a little—dishevelled.
And then at last came a stir of relief from the patient audience, and the white figures retreated to a form, looking excited and hot. The examiner prefaced his report with a short lecture upon butter in general, keeping a nervous eye on Harriet the while. She was on the point of argument more than once, but Wiggie, close at hand, always seemed to know when the explosion was due, and conjured up a Quetta-ling to distract her.