"No, I just thought I might find a job there."
"You can," Pieter assured him. "But if a job is what you want, a job is what I can give you. I can't pay you any money, at least until we have sold our fall crops, because we haven't any. But I can give you all you can eat, a good bed to sleep in, and I have some clothes that will fit you."
Ramsay said deliberately, "Devil Chad won't like you for that."
"Around here," and there was no air of braggadocio in Pieter's words, "we don't much care what Devil Chad likes."
Ramsay looked hard at his host, and then the two young men grinned at each other.
"You've got yourself a man," Ramsay said. "What do we do first?"
Hidden from the house by a jutting shoulder of land, Ramsay stood beside the small lake on Pieter Van Hooven's property and peeled off his clothes. All day long, interrupted in mid-morning by Marta, who brought him a substantial lunch, at noon by a huge and delicious dinner and again in mid-afternoon with a lunch, he had toiled in Pieter Van Hooven's sprouting corn.
All day long the sun had beaten down and, though the lake shore was cool enough, a man doing hard physical labor could easily work up a sweat. But it was good. Ramsay had felt the sun's rays penetrate to and warm the very marrow of his bones. In spite of the hard labor he had been doing, few times in his life had he felt as agile and supple and wholly alive as this.
He plunged headlong into the lake and came up gasping. The water was cold, though not nearly as cold as the big lake; and after Ramsay's body was adjusted to it, a delicious glow ran through his whole physical being. He dived again, then climbed up on the soft grass to let the lowering sun dry him before he put his clothes on.