Dad said, "Won't Missus Dwyer let you have a dishful until we get some?"
"No," Mother answered; "I can't ask her until we send back what we owe them."
Dad reflected again. "The Andersons, then?" he said.
Mother shook her head and asked what good there was it sending to them when they, only that morning, had sent to her for some?
"Well, we must do the best we can at present," Dad answered, "and I'll go to the store this evening and see what is to be done."
Putting the fence up again in the hurry that Dad was in was the very devil! He felled the saplings—and such saplings!—TREES many of them were—while we, "all of a muck of sweat," dragged them into line. Dad worked like a horse himself, and expected us to do the same. "Never mind staring about you," he'd say, if he caught us looking at the sun to see if it were coming dinner-time—"there's no time to lose if we want to get the fence up and a crop in."
Dan worked nearly as hard as Dad until he dropped the butt-end of a heavy sapling on his foot, which made him hop about on one leg and say that he was sick and tired of the dashed fence. Then he argued with Dad, and declared that it would be far better to put a wire-fence up at once, and be done with it, instead of wasting time over a thing that would only be burnt down again. "How long," he said, "will it take to get the posts? Not a week," and he hit the ground disgustedly with a piece of stick he had in his hand.
"Confound it!" Dad said, "have n't you got any sense, boy? What earthly use would a wire-fence be without any wire in it?"
Then we knocked off and went to dinner.
No one appeared in any humour to talk at the table. Mother sat silently at the end and poured out the tea while Dad, at the head, served the pumpkin and divided what cold meat there was. Mother would n't have any meat—one of us would have to go without if she had taken any.