We all looked toward the point, half-way down the central barn-floor, where the democrat wagon, drawn crosswise, served to divide our improvised living-room and kitchen. Through the wheels, and under its uplifted pole, we could vaguely discern two petticoated figures at the extreme other end, moving about the stove, the pipe of which was carried up and out through a little window above the door. Then Hurley appeared, ducking his head under the wagon-pole.
“I'm aitin' out here, convanient to the stove,” he shouted from this dividing-line.
“No, come and take your proper place!” bawled back the farmer, and Hurley had nothing to do but obey. He advanced with obvious reluctance, and halted at the foot of the table, eying with awkward indecision the three vacant chairs. One was M'rye's; the others would place him either next to the hated cooper or diagonally opposite, where he must look at him all the while.
“Sure, I'm better out there!” he ventured to insist, in a wheedling tone; but Abner thundered forth an angry “No, sir!” and the Irishman sank abruptly into the seat beside Hagadorn. From this place he eyed the Underwood girl with a glare of contemptuous disapproval. I learned afterward that M'rye and Janey Wilcox regarded her desertion of them as the meanest episode of the whole miserable morning, and beguiled their labors over the stove by recounting to each other all the low-down qualities illustrated by the general history of her “sap-headed tribe.”
Meanwhile conversation languished.
With the third or fourth instalment of cakes, Janey Wilcox had halted long enough to deliver herself of a few remarks, sternly limited to the necessities of the occasion. “M'rye says,” she declaimed, coldly, looking the while with great fixedness at the hay-wall, “if the cakes are sour she can't help it. We saved what was left over of the batter, but the Graham flour and the sody are both burnt up,” and with that stalked out again.
Not even politeness could excuse the pretence on anyone's part that the cakes were not sour, but Abner seized upon the general subject as an opening for talk.
“'Member when I was a little shaver,” he remarked, with an effort at amiability, “my sisters kicked about havin' to bake the cakes, on account of the hot stove makin' their faces red an' spoilin' their complexions, an' they wanted specially to go to some fandango or other, an' look their pootiest, an' so father sent us boys out into the kitchen to bake 'em instid. Old Lorenzo Dow, the Methodist preacher, was stoppin' over-night at our house, an' mother was jest beside herself to have everything go off ship-shape—an' then them cakes begun comin' in. Fust my brother William, he baked one the shape of a horse, an' then Josh, he made one like a jackass with ears as long as the griddle would allow of lengthwise, and I'd got jest comfortably started in on one that I begun as a pig, an' then was going to alter into a ship with sails up, when father, he come out with a hold-back strap, an'—well—mine never got finished to this day. Mother, she was mortified most to death, but old Dow, he jest lay back and laughed—laughed till you'd thought he'd split himself.”
“It was from Lorenzo Dow's lips that I had my first awakening call unto righteousness,” said Jee Hagadorn, speaking with solemn unction in high, quavering tones.
The fact that he should have spoken at all was enough to take even the sourness out of M'rye's cakes.