"I feel sure," said she, "that Celebrate Fourth will soon git something better to do than make a hand in the field. He has idees of makin' all kinds of money, if he could git Mr. Gowdy to lis'en to him. But Surrager Dowler is right where he orto be. He has got a patent corn-planter all worked out, and I guess Mr. Gowdy'll help him make and sell it. Mr. Gowdy is awful good to us--ain't he, Rowena."
Rowena busied herself with her work; and when Mrs. Fewkes repeated her appeal, the girl looked out of the window and paused a long time before she answered.
"Good enough," she finally said. "But I guess he ain't strainin' himself any to make something of us."
There was something strange and covered up in what she said, and in the way she said it. She shot a quick glance at me, and then looked down at her work again.
"Well, Rowena Fewkes!" exclaimed her mother, with her hands thrown up as if in astonishment or protest. "In all my born days, I never expected to hear a child of mine--"
Old Man Fewkes came in just then, and cut into the talk by his surprised exclamation at seeing me there. He had supposed that I had gone out of his ken forever. He had thought that one winter in this climate would be all that a young man like me, free as I was to go and come as I pleased, would stand. As he spoke about my being free, he looked at his wife and sighed, combing his whiskers with his skinny bird's claws, and showing the biggest freckles on the backs of his hands that I think I ever saw. He was still more stooped and frail-looking than when I saw him last; and when I told him I had settled down for life on my farm, I could see that I had lost caste with him. He was pining for the open road.
"Negosha," he said, "is the place for a young man. You can be a baron out there with ten thousan' head of rattle. But the place for me is Texas. Trees is in constant varder!"
"But," said Ma Fewkes, repeating her speech of three years ago, "it's so fur, Fewkes!"
"Fur!" he scornfully shouted, just as he had before. "Fur!" this time letting his voice fall in contempt for the distance, for any one that spoke of the distance, and for things in general in Iowa. "Why, Lord-heavens, womern, it hain't more'n fifteen hundred mile!"
"Fewkes," she retorted, drawing her shoulders back almost as far as she had had them forward a moment before, "I've been drailed around the country, fifteen hundred miles here, and fifteen hundred miles there, with old Tom takin' mad fits every little whip-stitch, about as much as I'm a-going to!"