David, below stairs, was talking with John Hirst, while both sent up clouds of smoke toward the rafter-beams. They had settled the matter of the axles, and Hirst was chuckling.
“Wish ye’d come up to-morrow’s evening, David. Yond turkeys of mine are not penned up yet, and ’t has grown to be a jest in Garth. What with being throng with the lambs, and cutting a new ditch in Marshy Field bottom, and all the spring work coming faster than I can deal with, I’ve no time to think o’ turkeys. The stakes ye made for me are lying just where ye left ’em, and they say in Garth—ay, pretty well every time I go down street—that the pen will be nice and ready for next year’s breeding-season.”
“’Tis time they were penned, Farmer, I own.”
“Time? I should think it was. Look ye, David, be up at five o’ the afternoon or so. There’ll be myself and my two men, and with you to help we should get the durned thing up in no time.”
“Right! Yond red-wattled dandy ’ull be fair uproarious, I reckon, when once his wings are clipped. Wakes the whole village as ’tis.”
They were silent, puffing quietly at their pipes, till David remembered the letter lying in his pocket and began to fumble for it among the odds and ends—nails and screws, a clasp-knife and a two-foot rule—which bulged his pocket out.
“Want your knowledgeable sort of head to help me, Farmer,” he said, handing the letter across Fanny’s curly hide. “Will the Driver brought the mails this morning, but I little fancied he carried aught for me, till the postman dropped a letter for me at the smithy. Write few letters myself, and get few; life’s over-short for such thankless waste o’ time.”
Hirst read the letter through. “Come all the way from Canada, ’twould seem,” he muttered. “And I should know the writer’s name, though I’m puzzled to guess where and when I last saw Joanna West.”
“Forgotten my mother’s sister, have ye, who wedded Joshua West of High Lands? So had I, or nearly, seeing ’tis twenty year since they left Garth.”
“Why, I must be getting past my memory, David! A bonnie lass she was, and spirited. I remember looking her way as a lad, till Cilla’s mother put all such fool’s nonsense out of my head for good and all! She was over-good for Joshua West, all the same. Bird of a feather, he, with Reuben Gaunt—settled to naught, liked spending money better than the earning of it; wanted to be pretty-boy-rover over all the countryside.”