"As you will," said Uli, and went somewhat heavy-hearted to bed.
"Well, you are the queerest man," said the old woman to her husband. "I liked what Uli said awfully well. It would have been to our advantage; and if those two fine gentlemen, the carter and the milker, don't have time to be drying their noses in the sun all day, it won't hurt 'em a bit, the scamps. Uli will be worth nothing to you, if you go on that way."
"But I won't take orders from a servant. If I let him do that he'd think nobody but he was to give orders. You've got to show 'em right from the start how you want to have things." grumbled Joggeli.
"Yes, you're the right one to show 'em; you spoil the good ones, and the bad ones you're afraid of and let 'em do as they please—that's your way," said his wife. "It's always been that way, and it isn't going to be any different now."
The next morning Uli told the mistress that one maid was superfluous on the threshing-floor, and she might keep for the house whichever she wanted. And Uli threshed through to the floor, and held his flail so that it touched his neighbor's and forced him to thresh the whole length of the grain to the wall; and when one section was done, the secondary tasks were quickly finished and they threshed again; and all this Uli effected not by words, but, by the rapidity of his own work. In the house they remarked that it seemed as if they must have different flails for the threshing; these sounded quite different, and as if they went through to the floor. The maid who was released told Freneli how they were going to do for this fellow; he needn't think that he was going to start a new system, for they weren't going to let themselves be tormented by such a fellow. She was sorry for him; he was well-mannered and he certainly could work, she must admit. Everything he put his hands to went well. While they were threshing the carter had ridden off, ostensibly to the blacksmith. The milker had gone off with the cow, but without telling his errand. It was noon before either came back, and neither had worked a stroke.
After dinner Uli helped peel the remaining potatoes, as is customary in well-ordered households if time permits; the others ran out, scarcely taking time to pray. When Uli came out there was an uproar in the barn; two couples were wrestling on the straw of the last threshing, while the others looked on. He called to the milker to come quickly and take out the calves and look to them; probably they needed to be shorn and salved. The milker said that wasn't Uli's business; nobody was to touch his calves; they would be all right for a long while. And the carter stepped up to Uli, crying, "Shall we have a try at each other—if you dare?" Uli's blood boiled, for he saw that it was a put-up job; yet he could not well refuse. Sooner or later, he well knew, he would have to stand up to them and show his mettle. And so he said to himself, let it be now; then they would have his measure.
"Ho, if you want to try it, I'm willing," he replied, and twice running he flung the Carter on his back so that the floor cracked. Then the milker said he would like to try too; to be sure, it was scarcely worth while to try falls with a walking-stick, with legs like pipe-stems and calves like fly-specks. With his brown hairy arms he grasped Uli as if he would pull him apart like an old rag. But Uli held his ground and the milker made no headway. He grew more and more angry, took hold with ever greater venom, spared neither arms nor legs, and butted with his head like an animal, until at last Uli had enough of it, collected all his strength, and gave him such a swing that he flew over the grain-pile into the middle of the floor and fell on the further side; there he lay with all fours in the air, and for a long time did not know where he was.
As if by chance Freneli had brought food for the hogs and had seen Uli's victory. In the house she told her godmother that she had seen something that tickled her. They had wanted to give Uli a beating; he had had to wrestle with them, but he was a match for them all. He had thrown the hairy milker on his back as if he had never stood up. She was glad that he could manage them all; then they would be afraid of him and respect him. But Uli, interrupted in his examination of the calves, seized a flail and merely told the milker that he had no time for the calves today; they would look to them another day. The cleaning of the grain took more time than usual, and yet they were through quicker and the grain was better cleaned; but they had exerted themselves more, too, and in consequence had felt the cold less. When Uli told the master how much grain he had obtained, the latter said that they had never done so much this year and yet today they had been threshing the fallen grain.
In the evening, as they sat at table, the master came and said he thought it would be convenient to cut wood now; the horses weren't needed, the weather was fine, and it seemed to him that the threshing and the wood-cutting could go on together if properly arranged. The carter said the horses' hoofs were not sharpened; and another said that they couldn't go on threshing by sixes, but at most by fours, and would never get done. Uli said nothing.
Finally, when Joggeli had no further answers to give, and was out-talked by the servants, he said to Uli, "Well, what do you think?"