Bascom Barnard turned into the road that led to Bluff Springs. The sound of hammering and sawing, and the merry clatter of tongues proclaimed the camp-ground before he was in sight of it. He rode into the busy little city where board and canvas tents were going up like magic. Brother Wilkins, the minister, called cheerfully:
“Hello, Brother Barnard, where’s Sister Barnard, ain’t she coming?”
“She kinder thot she wouldn’t come. Ma’ Jane sets a lot o’ store by the cows and things, ye see—so she reckoned she’d stay.”
He rode hurriedly down the line of tents, where a fire of questions met him at every turn.
“I jes couldn’t get Ma’ Jane to come,” he explained to Miss Mirandy Barr. “It don’t suit her to come away and leave things at six’s and seven’s, as she says, so she jes stays by the stuff, Ma’ Jane does.”
Bascom Barnard began helping people to get their tents in order.
Before noon, he told his friends that Ma’ Jane didn’t know what she was missing, and immediately after dinner—chicken-pie and fixin’s—if they thought it would do any good, he would go after Ma’ Jane yet and make her come, whether or no.
Just before the afternoon service, he said it was an awful mistake to have a body’s mind on worldly things.
In the still hours of the night Bascom reasoned it out. He had not treated himself to a holiday this many a year, and now he felt he was entitled to one. Ma’ Jane could take hers some other time; besides, a woman’s work was never wearin’ like a man’s—keepin’ house was like play compared with what he had been called upon to do. He turned over on the fragrant hay mattress, with which Sister Clark had provided him, and went comfortably to sleep.