“Wal, I’ll bet Sim’s more to blame than she is. Why they aint a harder-workin’ woman in the hull State of Ioway than she is—”
“Except Marm Council.”
“Except nobody. Look at her, jest skin and bones.”
Council chuckled in his vast way. “That’s so, mother, measured in that way she leads over you. You git fat on it.”
She smiled a little, her indignation oozing away; she never “could stay mad,” her children were accustomed to tell her. Burns refused to talk any more about the matter, and the visitors gave it up, and got out their team and started for home, Mrs. Council firing this parting shot:—
“The best thing you can do to-day is t’ let her alone. Mebbe the childern ‘ll bring her round again. If she does come round, you see ‘t you treat her a little more ‘s y’ did when you was a-courtin’ her.”
“This way,” roared Council, putting his arm around his wife’s waist. She boxed his ears while he guffawed and clucked at his team.
Burns took a measure of salt and went out into the pasture to salt the cows. On the sunlit slope of the field, where the cattle came running and bawling to meet him, he threw down the salt in handfuls, and then lay down to watch them as they eagerly licked it up, even gnawing a bare spot in the sod in their eagerness to get it all.
Burns was not a drinking man; was hard-working, frugal, in fact, he had no extravagances except his tobacco. His clothes he wore until they all but dropped from him; and he worked in rain and mud, as well as dust and sun. It was this suffering and toiling all to no purpose that made him sour and irritable. He didn’t see why he should have so little after so much hard work.
He was puzzled to account for it all. His mind (the average mind) was weary with trying to solve an insoluble problem. His neighbors, who had got along a little better than himself, were free with advice and suggestion as to the cause of his persistent poverty.