On my replying that such was the case, he looked at me as if thinking I was larger or smaller than he had imagined, and continued apparently in better humor:—
“I have heard of you. I live here. I’m the hired man. My name is Big Adam; lazy Adam, she calls me.”
I had heard that little eyes denoted cunning, and little ears great curiosity, and Big Adam’s were so particularly small that I determined to be very wary of him during my stay.
“She owns the farm, though Biggs pretends to own it,” Big Adam went on, “but, while they do not agree in this, they agree that Big Adam hasn’t enough to do, and is very lazy, and between them I have a great deal of trouble. I do all the work that is done here, and though you may think from looking around that I am not kept very busy, I am. There are four hundred acres here, and they expect me to keep it in a high state of cultivation. You see how well I succeed; it’s the worst-looking place on earth.”
I began to understand him better, and said it looked very well when I drove up.
“May be it does—from the road, but I haven’t been out there for a year to see. I am kept too busy. But if you stay here long I’ll take you out into the field, and show you weeds higher than your head. Instead of spending the money to mend the stables and fences, they buy more land with it, to give Big Adam something to do; for they are always saying that I am fat from idleness. I am fat, but not from idleness. I haven’t had time this spring to comb my hair. Look at it.”
He took off the Λ-shaped hat, and held his head down for me to see. It reminded me of the brush heaps in which we found rabbits at home, and I wished Jo had come along; he would have been delighted to shingle it.
“But you go into the house,” he said, putting on his hat again, and, taking up the fork he had laid down to hunt a stall for my horses: “you’ll hear enough of lazy Adam in there. They’ll tell you I’m lazy and shiftless, because I can’t do the work of a dozen men; and they’ll tell you I am surly, because I can’t cheerfully go ahead and do all they ask me to. A fine opinion of Big Adam you’ll have when you go away; but I ask you to notice while you are here if Big Adam is not always at work: and Agnes will tell you—she is the only one among them who pretends to tell the truth—that she has never seen me idle. But go on into the house; I am not allowed to talk to strangers.”
Accepting this suggestion, I went through a gate which was torn off its hinges and lying flat in the path, and, walking up the steps, I knocked timidly at the front door. While waiting for some one to answer my rap, I noticed a door-plate hanging on one screw, and, careening my head around, read “Lytle Biggs.” I then understood why his neighbors called him Little Biggs—it was his name.
I hadn’t time to congratulate myself on this discovery, for just then the door-plate flew in, and Agnes stood before me. Although she was friendly to me as usual there was a constraint in her manner that I could not understand, and as she led the way in she looked as though she was expecting the house to blow up.