We went. The spring-hole had been trodden by the poor, eager creatures into a useless [pg 070] jelly of mud. Jonathan fell to work, while I held the lantern high. But soon it became more than a mere matter of holding the lantern. There was a crashing in the blackness about us and a huge horned head emerged behind my shoulder, another loomed beyond Jonathan’s stooping bulk.
“Keep ’em back,” he said. “They’ll have it all trodden up again—Hi! You! Ge’ back ’ere!” There is as special a lingo for talking to cattle as there is for talking to babies. I used it as well as I could. I swung the lantern in their faces, I brandished the hoe-handle at them, I jabbed at them recklessly. They snorted and backed and closed in again,—crazy, poor things, with the smell of the water. It was an evening’s battle for us. Jonathan dug and dug, and then laid rails, and the precious water filled in slowly, grew to a dark pool, and the thirsty creatures panted and snuffed in the dark just outside the radius of the hoe-handle, until at last we could let them in. I had forgotten my books, for we had come close to the earth and the creatures of the earth. The cows were our sisters and the steers our brothers that night.
Sometimes the emergency was in the barn—a broken halter and trouble among the horses, or perhaps a new calf. Sometimes a stray creature,—cow or horse,—grazing along the roadside, got into our yard and threatened our corn and squashes and my poor, struggling flower-beds. Once it was a break in the wire fence around Jonathan’s muskmelon patch in the barn meadow. The cows had just been turned in, and if it wasn’t mended that evening it meant no melons that season, also melon-tainted cream for days.
Once or twice each year it was the drainpipe from the sink. The drain, like the pump, was an innovation. Our ancestors had always carried out whatever they couldn’t use or burn, and dumped it on the far edge of the orchard. In a thinly settled community, there is much to be said for this method: you know just where you are. But we had the drain, and occasionally we didn’t know just where we were.
“Coffee grounds,” Jonathan would suggest, with a touch of sternness.
“No,” I would reply firmly; “coffee grounds are always burned.”
“What then?”
“Don’t know. I’ve poked and poked.”
A gleam in the corner of Jonathan’s eye—“What with?”
“Oh, everything.”