“Reckoned ye’d be along in time to cut the first swath,” returned Gaspard.
Mick Otter nodded his head and looked at Tom. His eyes were round and dark and very bright. He stared unwinking for several seconds, then turned again to Gaspard.
“You got young man for Catherine, what?” he said.
Gaspard smiled.
“That’s as may be,” he replied. “Ask Catherine herself, if ye wanter know. Howsumever, this here’s Tom Anderson, from ’way over on the upper St. John. He speared a salmon an’ the wardens chased ’im out.”
“That so?” said Mick Otter. “Chase ’im quite a ways, what?”
Tom laughed goodnaturedly.
The three went into the house, where Catherine welcomed Mick Otter cordially and produced a second breakfast. The Maliseet ate swiftly, heartily and in silence, nodding or shaking his head now and then in answer to a question. Then the three men returned to the scythes and the grindstone. Fifteen minutes later they were mowing in the oldest and ripest meadow. Mick Otter led along the edge of the field; old Gaspard followed and Tom brought up the rear. Tom had learned to swing a scythe when a small boy. Like swimming and milking, it is a knack not easily forgotten. Catherine came out and sat on the fence. Mick Otter left his place and walked over to her, wiped his long blade with a handful of grass and then played on it with his ringing scythe-stone. Returning the stone to his hip-pocket, he said, “How that young feller come here, anyhow?”
“Why, how would he come?” returned the girl, “not in a canoe, that’s certain; and he didn’t bring a horse.”
“Maybe he walk here, hey?”