"Then I'm going tomorrow on the ten o'clock train," said Early Ann. She began to pack in the parlor while the family showered advice and ran errands.
Sarah kissed her goodby tearfully. Gus was suspiciously misty-eyed as he carried her telescope suitcase out to the Ford, and Stud drove her recklessly to the station where he insisted on paying for her round-trip ticket and for a chair on the parlor car—a luxury he had never allowed himself.
"You hang on to your money, young lady," he said. "And don't make up to any city fellows."
He stood watching the train until it had passed out of sight around the curve, then leaping into his Ford roared back to the farm where he began two weeks of mad labor. He worked on the fences, set posts, strung shining lines of new barbed wire, pruned several trees and filled a small ravine with boulders. He trapped a weasel that had been getting his chickens, put barrels around his young fruit trees to save them from the rabbits. He sent for a new stump-puller, seductively described in the mail order catalogue, hoping to clean out the brush lot in the slack months which were ahead.
One morning he noticed that the barns needed painting. He called in Mack Curren, who had finally given up hope of being a great portrait painter. Mack and his crew gave the buildings a new red coat visible for miles.
"Might as well be fancy and add white trimmings," Stud told the willing Mr. Curren.
Stud himself was hard at work on the new silo. He drove himself happily these days, and he drove Gus who was not so happy concerning his employer's sudden desire to move the world, to paint the farm from end to end, and to add a wing to the milk house.
Stud remembered to bring in frosty asters and goldenrod to Sarah. He told her that what she needed was a wild duck dinner, and he fixed himself a blind beside the lake and waited, watching his decoys.
The shotgun shells were heavy and cool in his hand. The long, clean barrels of his gun shone like blue fire when he looked through them at the sun. Not a speck of dust! Every part oiled and working like a seventeen-jewel watch. The carved walnut stock was as smooth as satin to his fingers, and the gun balanced perfectly as he threw it to his shoulder.
He had carved the decoys himself from white pine and had painted the intricate markings from memory. He knew the glossy green head and bold coloration of the drake mallard, as well as the more modest hues of his mate. He was familiar to the last tail feather with the tones and patterns which distinguish canvasback, redhead, bluebill, widgeon, goldeneye, and black mallard. He could imitate the quack of a duck or the honk of a Canadian goose almost too well for his own safety.