A child of eight ran from the rear of the premises. Hubbard frowned and stopped his team.
“You better keep away from there,” he growled, “or you’ll fall into the well.”
The girl glanced at him impishly.
“You an’ Missus Hubbard don’t speak to each other, do you?”
Hubbard’s face went black. His whip sprang out and caught the girl about the legs. She yelped and ran.
An eighth of a mile farther along the road Hubbard turned in and drove his team to a big barn. He fed his stock. It was after six when he entered the house. This was a structure that, by comparison with the gigantic barn in the rear, seemed pigmy-like.
A sallow, flat-chested woman, with a wisp of hair twisted into a knot, took from Hubbard the two pails of milk he carried. She set them in the kitchen. The two exchanged no words.
Hubbard strode to the washstand, his boots thumping the floor, and performed his ablutions. He rumpled his hair and beard, using much soap and water and blowing stertorously. In the dining-room a girl of twelve sat with a book. As her father came in she glanced at him timorously.
He gave no heed to her as he slumped down into a chair standing before a desk. The desk was littered with papers, among which were typewritten sheets of the sort referred to as “pleadings”; there was a title-search much bethumbed and black along the edges, where the “set-outs” had been scanned with obvious care.
The man adjusted a pair of antiquated spectacles to his dish-face. To do this he was compelled to pull the ends of the bows tight back over the ears as his nose afforded practically no bridge to support the glasses.