Dan had little time for grief or reflection, however, as, before he was quite through with watering the animals, Mrs. Savage blew the horn for supper, the house being across the road from the barn. To the horn’s strident note she added her own voice:
“Now come along lively, Dan. I can’t keep supper all night fer a lazy, good-fer-nothin’ boy. I want t’ git th’ dishes washed up, an’ ye’ve got t’ dry ’em. Hurry up with that work, an’ don’t dawdle over it all night.”
Dan hurriedly finished with the horses and went into the house. The two hired men of the farm were already at the table, eating very fast, as if they feared some one would take the victuals away before they were through. They nodded to Dan who, after a hasty wash in the tin basin outside, took his place.
The kitchen was the room most in use in Mr. Savage’s house. There the meals were served, and, what little leisure time the hired men had, they spent there, when they were not at the village store, talking with their cronies.
The room was of fair size, and contained a large range, which made it very hot in summer time; a sink and pump, and a large mantlepiece, over which hung an old musket, that Mr. Savage said his grandfather had used in the Revolutionary War. Some of his acquaintances remarked that Mr. Savage was too cowardly to go to war himself, so he had no relics of the great Civil conflict.
Adjoining the kitchen was a sort of dairy and meal room, where Mrs. Savage kept the feed for numerous chickens. What with that, and the fact that a wood-shed, where fuel was kept, also opened out of this apartment, and with the hot stove and the smell of cooking, the kitchen was not the most cheerful place in the world.
“Don’t be all night over yer meal now,” said Mrs. Savage with a cross look at Dan. “Ye’ve made trouble enough as it is, an’ Mr. Savage had t’ go ’way without supper t’ see Mr. Lee ’count of that bull. Ye’ve got t’ help me with th’ work, fer I’m goin’t’ set bread.”
Dan did not reply, and to the questions from the hired men, who asked them when Mrs. Savage was out of the room, he told as little as possible of the bull incident.
“Never mind,” consoled Jonas Hannock, one of the men, as he finished his piece of apple pie, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Never mind, Dan. Bad luck can’t last forever,” for which little sympathy the boy was grateful.
He was tired, not only from his work on the farm, but from his chase after the bull, still he could not rest.