“If you’re going to run this business you may as well do it without my help and I’ll quit,” he said, his body braced away from her with the plain intimation that he preferred that she should not touch him.
Elizabeth hesitated. Her impulse was to turn and leave him without further words, but the farm, their future comfort, the whole scheme of family peace and harmony depended upon obtaining a hearing.
“I don’t want to run things—really, I do not. I’ve never tried to, but I’ve lived on a farm, and I know how impossible it is ever to raise a mortgage if you get it on a place. I—let’s sell enough to raise the one we have on this eighty while we can, instead. I’m willing to live on a little; but, oh, John, I do so want to have one place that is our own.”
“There’s money in those cattle,” John answered sullenly. “A woman don’t know anything about such things. You’ll go and get mother started on it too, I suppose. I’m going to do as I see fit about it, anyhow. I know there’s money to be made there.”
With a great sob in her throat, Elizabeth turned to the house.
“Look here, Elizabeth,” John called after her peremptorily.
Elizabeth stopped respectfully to listen, but she did not return to his side. John waited, thinking she would come to him.
“Cattle ain’t like ordinary farming,” he argued with a flush of anger. “A man simply has to take time to let steers grow into money. We haven’t been at it a long enough time. Those big steers will be ready to feed this fall, and corn’s going to be cheap. We’d be cutting off our noses to spite our own faces to sell now.”
“Perhaps,” the girl replied bitterly, and went on to the house.
She knew that John had argued with the hope of getting her to admit herself in the wrong, not to hear her side of the case.