The gloom of night was still in the kitchen; in the corner where the stove stood it was so dark that Ollie had to grope her way, yawning heavily, feeling that she would willingly trade the last year of her life for one more hour of sleep that moist spring morning.
Isom mounted the kitchen stairs and roused Joe, lumbering down again straightway and stringing the milk-pails on his arms without waiting to see the result of his summons.
“Send him on down to the barn when he’s ready,” directed Isom, jangling away in the pale light of early day.
Ollie fumbled around in her dark corner for kindling, and started a fire in the kitchen stove with a great rattling of lids. Perhaps there was more alarm than necessary in this primitive and homely task, sounded with the friendly intention of carrying a warning to Joe, who was making no move to obey his master’s call.
Ollie went softly to the staircase and listened. Joe’s snore was rumbling again, as if he traveled a heavy road in the land of dreams. She did not feel that she could go and shake him out of his sleep and warn him of the penalty of such remission, but she called softly from where she stood:
“Joe! You must get up, Joe!”
But her voice was not loud enough to wake a bird. Joe slept on, like a heavy-headed boor, and she went back to the stove to put the kettle on to boil. The issue of his recalcitration must be left between him and Isom. If he had 41 good blood in him, perhaps he would fight when Isom lifted his hand and beat him out of his sleep, she reflected, hoping simply that it would turn out that way.
Isom came back to the house in frothing wrath a quarter of an hour later. There was no need to ask about Joe, for the bound boy’s nostrils sounded his own betrayal.
Isom did not look at Ollie as he took the steep stairs four treads at a step. In a moment she heard the sleeper’s bed squeaking in its rickety old joints as her husband shook him and cut short his snore in the middle of a long flourish.
“Turn out of here!” shouted Isom in his most terrible voice–which was to Ollie’s ears indeed a dreadful sound–“turn out and git into your duds!”