She rose at last and carried her second load of milk to the well, strained it, washed out the pails, and after bathing her tired feet in a tub that stood there, she put on a pair of horrible shoes without stockings, and crept stealthily into the house. Sim did not hear her as she slipped up the stairs to the little low, unfinished chamber beside her oldest children,—she could not bear to sleep near him that night,—she wanted a chance to sob herself to quiet.
As for Sim, he was a little disturbed but would as soon have cut off his head as acknowledge himself in the wrong, but he yelled as he went to bed, and found her still away:—
“Say, ol’ woman, aint ye comin’ to bed?” and upon receiving no answer he rolled his aching body into the creaking bed. “Do as ye damn please about it. If ye wan’ to sulk y’ can.” And in such wise the family grew quiet in sleep, while the moist, warm air pulsed with the ceaseless chime of the crickets.
II.
When Sim Burns woke the next morning he felt a sharper twinge of remorse. It was not a broad or well-defined feeling, just a sense that he’d been unduly irritable, not that on the whole he was not in the right. Little Pet lay with the warm June sunshine filling his baby eyes, curiously content in striking at flies that buzzed around his little mouth.
The man thrust his dirty naked feet into his huge boots, and, without washing his face or combing his hair, went out to the barn to do his chores.
He was a type of the prairie farmer and his whole surrounding was typical. He had a quarter-section of fine level land, mortgaged, of course, but his house was a little box-like structure, costing, perhaps, five hundred dollars. It had three rooms and the ever-present “summer kitchen” attached to the back. It was unpainted and had no touch of beauty, a mere box.
His stable was built of slabs and banked and covered with straw. It looked like a den, was low and long, and had but one door in the end. The cow-yard held ten or fifteen cattle of various kinds, while a few calves were bawling from a pen near by. Behind the barn on the west and north was a fringe of willows forming a “wind-break.” A few broken and discouraged fruit trees standing here and there among the weeds formed the garden. In short, he was spoken of by his neighbors as “a hard-working cuss, and tollably well fixed.”
No grace had come or ever could come into his life. Back of him were generations of men like himself, whose main’ business had been to work hard, live miserably, and beget children to take their places after they died. He was a product.
His courtship had been delayed so long on account of poverty that it brought little of humanizing emotion into his life. He never mentioned it now, or if he did, it was only to sneer obscenely at it. He had long since ceased to kiss his wife or even speak kindly to her. There was no longer any sanctity to life or love. He chewed tobacco and toiled on from year to year without any very clearly defined idea of the future.