Finally Mary, smiling and blushing, took hold of the pole and helped to dip and draw up the bucket full to the brim. Then they laugh too; and the social ice is broken between Bear Grass and Straight Creek; between the city-bred young lawyer and Mary, the mountain girl.
Cornwall carried the bucket into the kitchen; at which Caleb, in surprise, called out: "Dad, look! That city feller is helping Mary get dinner."
After dinner, which Cornwall did not help get, rushing out of the kitchen as soon as he could let go of the bucket handle, having heard Caleb's remark; they rode over the Brock and Helton two hundred-acre surveys and called at their homes.
Mr. Rogers contracted to purchase their land at one hundred dollars an acre, the vendors executing bonds to convey, each receiving one thousand dollars on the purchase price; the balance to be paid after a survey and examination of their titles.
As they were riding home, Saylor saw a drunken man staggering down the mountain side. When he had gotten out of sight, he dismounted and began trailing him back up the mountain. Mr. Rogers called out, "The man went the other way."
"Oh, I know that! I want to find out where he came from."
Saylor returned in a few minutes, his face beaming with a ruddy, contented smile.
Then, in his usually talkative mood, he expressed his opinion of his neighbors and the transaction in reference to their land. "There are two more dang fools, who will move down in the blue grass and buy a farm and be as much at home as a hoot owl on a dead snag in the noon day sun with a flock of crows cawing at him. In about two years they will sell out to some sharper and move back to some mountain cove or crick bottom and start all over again; or when they gits their money they will hop the train cars for Kansas and settle on a government claim twenty miles from a drap of water; then mosey back here in about five years with nothing but their kids, the old woman, two bony horses, a prairie schooner and a yaller dog."
As they came in the door, Mary was just completing preparation for supper. The table was made more attractive by a red figured table cloth instead of the brown and white oil cloth one. In the center was a pot of delicate ferns. The regular fare of corn bread, hog meat, corn field beans, potatoes, sorghum and coffee, had been supplemented by some nicely browned chicken, a roll of butter, biscuits and a dish of yellow apples and red plums.
As they came to supper, a gentle rain began falling which continued long into the night.