Zeen did not answer, but stood there shivering and staring, with his eyes fixed on a bluebonnet in the cut corn.
“Come, come, Zeen, get it done! Have just another try: it’ll get cooler directly and we’ll be finished before dark.”
“Oh, Zalia, it’s so awfully hot here and it’ll be long before it’s evening!”
“But, Zeen, what do you feel?”
Zeen made no movement.
“Are you ill?”
“Yes, I am, Zalia. No, not ill, but I feel so queer and I think I ought to go home.”
Zalia did not know what to do: she was frightened and did not understand his funny talk.
“If you’re ill ... if you can’t go on, you’d better get home quick: you’re standing there like a booby.”
Zeen left his sickle on the ground and went straight off the field. She saw him go slowly, the poor old soul, lurching like a drunken man, and disappear behind the trees. Then she took her straw-band and bundled up all the little heaps of corn, one after the other, and bound them into sheaves. She next took the sickle and the hook and just went cutting away like a man: stubbornly, steadily, with a frenzied determination to get it done. The more the corn fell, the quicker she made the sickle whizz.