Mrs. Waycroft put her hand on the smooth, wooden windlass and peered down into the well. "This is a better place, Ann, to keep milk and butter cool than a spring-house, if you can just make folks careful about letting the bucket down. I got my well filled with milk from a busted jug once, when one of the hands, in a big hurry, pushed the bucket in and let it fall to the water."
"Nobody draws water here but me," said Ann. She had fixed her friend with a steady, penetrating stare. She was silent for a moment, then she said, abruptly: "You've got something else to say besides that about the new preacher; I have got so I read you like a book. I watched you coming along the road. I could see you over the roof of the house when you was high up in the edge of the timber, and I knew by your step you had something unusual on your mind. Besides, you know good and well that I'd never darken the door of that house again, not if forty new preachers held forth there. No, you didn't come all the way here so early for that."
The other woman smiled sheepishly under her gingham bonnet.
"I'm not going to meeting myself," she said, "and I reckon I was just talking to hear myself run on. I'm that away, you know."
"You might learn not to beat the Old Nick around a stump with a woman like me," said Ann, firmly. "You know I go straight at a thing. I've found that it pays in business and everything else."
"Well, then, I've come to tell you that I'm going over to Gilmer to-morrow to see my brother and his wife."
"Ah, you say you are!" Ann showed surprise against her will. "Gilmer?"
"Yes, you see, Ann, they've been after me for a long time, writing letters and sending word, so now that my crop is laid by I've not really got a good excuse to delay; seems like everything tends to pull me that way whether or no, for Pete McQuill is going over in the morning with an empty wagon, and, as he's coming back Thursday, why, it will just suit. I wouldn't want to stay longer than that."
The two women stood staring at each other in silence for a moment, then Ann shrugged her powerful shoulders and averted her eyes.
"That wasn't all you come to say," she said, almost tremulously.