"That's what you get gallivantin' around nights," said Stud. The men laughed.
"How you do talk," said Gus. "You know I ain't took a girl into a haymow for twenty years."
"How about a cornfield?" Stud asked.
Laths tipped with steel were spudded through the butt ends of the stalks—five or six plants to each lath. The tobacco was then loaded upon wagons and hauled to the sheds. Men climbed nimbly among the poles hanging the heavily laden laths, tier upon tier. The hot, suffocating air was pungent with the smell of green tobacco.
The thick, moss-green leaves were soft and heavy as velvet to the touch. Later they would be brown and brittle. Still later, when to the vast excitement of the countryside "case" weather began, they would be fine and pliable as thin brown leather.
The swallows had gathered long weeks before, and, as though at some invisible signal sent along the thousands of miles of wire on which they were mobilized, had left over night for the south. The fields were strewn with yellowing pumpkins and swelling hubbard squashes, knobbed, burly, and deep green. The first ducks were dropping in from the north. Soon it would be time for the Rock County Fair.
As fair week approached, however, Stud announced his decision to remain at home. He declared that since Ulysses and Sarah were both laid up, Peter still thrashing, and Early Ann of necessity tied to the housework, he too would pass up the event of the year.
He looked over the fence into the pen of Ulysses S. Grant and shook his head sadly.
"We're just a couple of darned old fools!"
"Oink," said the boar.