“Too many cooks spoil the broth,” was his comment upon this. “’Tis far better to hearken to one man only. If he’s right, you’re right. If he’s wrong, why, thin, there ye have him in front of ye for protection.”
Bedtime came soon after, and Mrs. Beech appeared in her nightly round of the house to see that the doors were all fastened. The candle she bore threw up a flaring yellow light upon her chin, but made the face above it by contrast still darker and more saturnine. She moved about in erect impassiveness, trying the bolts and the window-catches, and went away again, having said never a word. I had planned to ask her if I might now have a bed to myself, but somehow my courage failed me, so stern and majestic was her aspect.
I took the desired boon without asking, and dreamed of her as a darkling and relentless Joab in petticoats, slaying her own son Jeff as he hung by his hay-colored hair in one of the apple-trees of our orchard.
CHAPTER IV—ANTIETAM
On all the other farms roundabout, this mid-August was a slack season. The hired men and boys did a little early fruit-picking, a little berrying, a little stone-drawing, but for the most part they could be seen idling about the woods or along the river down below Juno Mills, with gun or fish-pole. Only upon the one farm whose turn it was that week to be visited by the itinerant threshing-machine, was any special activity visible.
It was well known, however, that we were not to get the threshing-machine at all. How it was managed, I never understood. Perhaps the other farmers combined in some way to over-awe or persuade the owners of the machine into refusing it to Abner Beech. More likely he scented the chance of a refusal and was too proud to put himself in its way by asking. At all events, we three—Abner, Hurley, and I—had to manage the threshing ourselves, on the matched wood floor of the carriage barn. All the fishing I did that year was in the prolific but unsubstantial waters of dreamland.
I did not work much, it is true, with the flail, but I lived all day in an atmosphere choked with dust and chaff, my ears deafened with the ceaseless whack! whack! of the hard-wood clubs, bringing on fresh shocks of grain, and acting as general helper.
By toiling late and early we got this task out of the way just when the corn was ready to cut. This great job taxed all the energies of the two men, the one cutting, the other stacking, as they went. My own share of the labor was to dig the potatoes and pick the eating-apples—a quite portentous enough undertaking for a lad of twelve. All this kept me very much to myself. There was no chance to talk during the day, and at night I was glad to drag my tired limbs off to bed before the girls had fairly cleared the supper things away. A weekly newspaper—The World—came regularly to the postoffice at the Corners for us, but we were so overworked that often it lay there for weeks at a time, and even when some one went after it, nobody but Abner cared to read it.