—"soak me in the guts with three bundles to onct an' knock me off'n the top of the load?"
"Ever since morning you've been kidding me and telling me I went too slow for you.... I thought I'd speed up a bit."
After surveying me scornfully for a minute, he mutely reascended the load, and we finished the job in silence together....
We laboured on after sunset till the full moon swung over the tree-tops.
Usually they did not use the cook-shack much ... it was used while on the road from one wheat farm to another. Usually the farmers' wives and daughters in the valleys and on the hillsides vied with each other as to heaping food before the threshers ... every morning saw mountains of pancakes ... bacon ... eggs ... ham ... beefsteak ... we laboured like giants, ate like hogs, slept like senseless stocks.
I climbed to my bed in the haymow that first night. It was chill enough for the use of my blanket.
I drowsed off, to wake with a jump of all my body from a dream that a giant was pressing down on me, that he had my legs doubled up over me and was breaking them into my breast....
The cramps....
I stood up and rubbed my legs till the taut tendons softened and stretched ... but when I dared bend them the littlest, the tautening and drawing twisted them again. And so I suffered half the night through, till, in wrathful agony, I stumbled to the watering trough and stood naked-white in the flood of the full moon, rubbing the icy water over my body....