"You?" laughed one of the others. "Anybody knows if a girl so much as looked crossways at you, you'd fall in a fit."
"Another thing," said David. "I can't have you fellers carryin' grain goin' to the house every minute for fried cakes or cookies."
"Now you git out," said Bill Young from the straw pile. "You ain't goin' to have all the fun to yerself."
Will's blood began to grow hot in his face. If Bill had said much more, or mentioned Agnes by name, he would have silenced him. To have this rough joking come so close upon the holiest and most exquisite evening of his life was horrible. It was not the words they said, but the tones they used, that vulgarized it all. He breathed a sigh of relief when the sound of the machine began again.
This jesting made him more wary, and when the call for dinner sounded and he knew he was going to see her, he shrank from it. He took no part in the race of the dust-blackened, half-famished men to get at the washing-place first. He took no part in the scurry to get seats at the first table.
Threshing-time was always a season of great trial to the housewife. To have a dozen men with the appetites of dragons to cook for, in addition to their other everyday duties, was no small task for a couple of women. Preparations usually began the night before with a raid on a hen-roost, for "biled chickun" formed the pièce de resistance of the dinner. The table, enlarged by boards, filled the sitting room. Extra seats were made out of planks placed on chairs, and dishes were borrowed from neighbors, who came for such aid in their turn.
Sometimes the neighboring women came in to help; but Agnes and her mother were determined to manage the job alone this year, and so the girl, in a neat dark dress, her eyes shining, her cheeks flushed with the work, received the men as they came in, dusty, coatless, with grime behind their ears, but a jolly good smile on every face.
Most of them were farmers of the neighborhood, and her schoolmates. The only one she shrank from was Bill Young, with his hard, glittering eyes and red, sordid face. She received their jokes, their noise, with a silent smile which showed her even teeth and dimpled her round cheek. "She was good for sore eyes," as one of the fellows said to Shep. She seemed deliciously sweet and dainty to these roughly dressed fellows.
They ranged along the table with a great deal of noise, boots thumping, squeaking, knives and forks rattling, voices bellowing out.
"Now hold on, Steve! Can't hev yeh so near that chickun!"