As he entered the house he saw his stepmother placing a dish of fried bacon upon the table, which was covered with a "watered" oilcloth of a bright walnut tint. At her back stood Sarah Jane with a plate of corn bread in one hand and a glass pitcher containing buttermilk in the other. She was a slight, flaxen-haired child, with wizened features and sore, red eyelids.
As his stepmother caught sight of him she stopped on her way to the stove and surveyed him with sharp but not unkindly eyes.
"You've been takin' your time 'bout comin' home," she remarked, "an' I reckon you're powerful hungry. You can sit down if you want to."
She was long and lean and withered, with a chronic facial neuralgia, which gave her an irritable expression and a querulous voice. For the past several years Nicholas had never seen her without a large cotton handkerchief bound tightly about her face. She had been the boy's aunt before she married his father, and her affection for him was proved by her allowing no one to harry him except herself.
"How's your face, ma?" asked Nicholas with the indifference of habit as he took his seat at the table, while Sarah Jane went to the door to call her father. When Burr came in the inquiry was repeated.
"Face any easier, Marthy?" It was a form that had been gone through with at every meal since the malady began, and Marthy Burr, while she deplored its insincerity, would have resented its omission.
"Don't you all trouble 'bout my neuralgy," she returned with resigned exasperation as she stood up to pour the coffee out of the large tin boiler. "It's mine, an' I've borne worse things, I reckon, which ain't sayin' that 'tain't near to takin' my head off."
Amos Burr drank his coffee without replying, the perspiration standing in drops on his large, freckled face and shining on his heavy eyebrows. Presently he looked at Nicholas, who was eating abstractedly, his gaze on his plate.
"I got that thar piece of land broke to-day," he said, "an' I reckon you can take the one-horse harrow and go over it to-morrow. Them peanuts ought to hev' been in the ground two weeks ago—"
"They ain't hulled yet," interrupted his wife. "Sairy Jane ain't done more'n half of 'em. She and Nick can do the balance after supper. Hurry up, Sairy Jane, and get through. Nannie, don't you touch another slice of that middlin'. You'll be frettin' all night."