"Did you call me, Mother Cow?" I asked softly.

The question was taken from my lips as Pan came out of the darkness behind her and took me into his arms.

"Yes, she called you. I didn't think I'd see you. I was just going to leave her for you and go my way; but trust women for secret communication," he said as my arm slipped around his bare throat.

"Not see me?" I questioned.

"I never wanted to see you again until I came for you, Woman. I didn't think I could stand it--to put you out of my arms again. I can't take you with me to-night. I came miles out of my way to bring her to you, and I've hurried them both cruelly. The calf is only two days old, but you do need her badly to feed the chickens. Milk-fed chickens show a gain of thirty per cent. over others. You can churn and get all the b.u.t.ter you need and feed them the b.u.t.termilk."

"Do you suppose I can learn to milk and churn her?" I asked as I shrank a bit closer in his arms from this new responsibility.

"Milk her and churn the milk," laughed Pan as he bent my head forward on his arm, set his teeth in the back of my neck, and shook me like p.e.c.k.e.rwood Pup shakes the gray kitten when I'm not looking.

"Will you show me in the morning?"

"Woman, I have to run ten miles through the forest before daybreak, and I don't know when I can come back to you. I know I ought to tell you things, but I--I just can't. I demand of life that I be allowed to come for you and take you into the woods with only your Romney bundle. Will you be here ready for me when I come, and keep the bundle tied up?"

"Yes," I answered as I drew his head down and pressed it to my breast, hoping that he might hear the chant on my heartstrings. I think he did hear.

"I am thy child.

I am thy mate.

Come!"

he made response, as he slipped from my arms and away into the darkness, leaving me alone with only the mother now for company. She licked my arm with a warm, rough tongue, and I came back into my own body and led her to the barn and supper.

There are two kinds of love, the cultivated kind that bores into a woman's heart through silk and laces in a hot-house atmosphere and brings about all kinds of enervating reactions until operated upon by marriage; the other kind a field woman breathes into her lungs and it gets into her circulation and starts up the most awful and productive activity. I've had both kinds. I moped for months over Gale Beacon, and made him and Matthew and father completely unhappy, lost ten pounds, and was sent to a rest-cure for temper. The next morning after Adam gave me the cow and calf and pa.s.sionate embraces out in the orchard I began to work like six women, and what I did to Elmnest not ten women could have accomplished in as many days.

I weeded the whole garden and I picked three bushels of our first peas, tied up sixty bunches of very young beets with long, tough orchard gra.s.s, treated fifty bunches of slender onions the same way, half a dozen of each to the bunch, and helped Bud Corn-ta.s.sel load a two-horse wagon with them and everything eatable he could get out of Aunt Mary's garden. Then I got up at two o'clock in the night and fed the mules so Bud could start at half-past two in order to be in the market at Hayesville long before the break of day, so as to sell the truck at the very top of the market to the earliest greengrocers. I gave Bud coffee and bread and b.u.t.ter and drove the team down to the gate while he went ahead to open it. I stood up while I drove, too, because Bud had not had room to put a seat in for himself and expected to stand up all the way to town. Talk about Mordkin and Pavlova!

To stand up and drive a team hitched to a jolt-wagon over boulders and roots requires leg muscles! I hope I will be able to restrain myself from driving the team into market some day, but I am not sure I can. With the eggs and the "truck" Bud brought back sixteen dollars, eleven of which were mine. I bought a peck of green peas for myself from myself and ate most of them for dinner by way of blowing in some of the money. Then the chant on my heartstrings speeded me up to white-washing all the chicken paraphernalia on the place, and I dropped corn behind Rufus' plow for a whole day, even if it was to produce food for the swine. I went to bed at night literally on time with the chickens. I could only stay awake to kneel and reach out the arms of prayer and enfold Pan to my heart for a very few seconds before I vaulted into the four-poster and tumbled into the depths of sleep.

My activities were not in any way limited by the stone walls that surround Elmnest, but they spread over entire Riverfield, which had very nearly quit the pursuit of agriculture and gone madly into a social adventure.

Everybody was getting ready for the trip into the capital city to answer the governor's invitation, and clothing of every color, texture, and s.e.x was being manufactured by the bolt. For every garment manufactured I was sponsor.

"I sure am glad you have come down, Nancy," said Mrs. Addc.o.c.k, with almost a moan; "that Mamie there won't let me turn up the hem of her dress without you, though I say what is a hem to a woman who has set in six pairs of sleeves since day before yesterday!"

"I want shoe-tops and Ma wants ankles," sniffed Mamie Addc.o.c.k. "Polly Beesley wears shoe-tops and she's seventeen and goes to the city to dance.

And Miss Bess' and yours are shoe-tops, too."

"Now you see what it is to raise a child to be led into sin and vanity,"

said Mrs. Addc.o.c.k, looking at me reproachfully from her seat upon the floor at the feet of the worldly Mamie.

"I'll turn up the hem just right, Mrs. Addc.o.c.k, while you get the collars on little Sammie's and Willie's shirts," I said soothingly as I sank down beside her at Mamie's feet.

"I had to cut Sammie's shirt with a tail to tuck in, all on account of that Mr. Matthew Berry's telling him that shirt and pants ought to do business together. And there's Willie's jeans pants got to have pockets for the knife that Mr. Owen gave him. I just can't keep up with these city notions of my children with five of 'em and a weak back." As she grumbled Mrs.

Addc.o.c.k rose slowly from her lowly position to her feet.

"I'll make Willie's trousers, Mrs. Addc.o.c.k, this afternoon, if he'll come and help me feed and bed everything at Elmnest," I offered, with my mouth full of pins.

"No, child, but thank you for your willing heart. Mrs. Spain told me how you made Ezra's pants so one leg of him came while the other went, and I guess a mother is the only one to get the legs of her own offspring to match. I'll work it out myself now that Miss Mamie is attended to."

"But now I know how to trouser boys normally. I turned Joe Tillett out in perfect proportion as well as in strong jeans," I answered, without the least offense at finding my first efforts as a tailor thus becoming the subject of kindly village gossip.

"Well, I hope this junket will turn out as Mary Beesley expects, with enjoyment for everybody. However, I'm going to risk my back with Mr.

Silas' mules rather than with that Bessie Rutherford's wheels that are not critter-drawn. I only hope she don't spill all my children, that I've had such a time getting here on earth, back into Kingdom Come."

"Would you rather go in my carriage with Mrs. Tillett, and let me go with Bess to hold in the children?" I asked with unconcealed eagerness.

"No, I don't believe so," answered Mrs. Addc.o.c.k, cannily. "Sallie Tillett is having her dress made b.u.t.toned up in the back, and she has been in the habit of feeding the baby whenever he cries for it, though he can 'most stand alone. She is going to depend on you and a bag of biscuit to manage him through the show, and I'd rather not take your place."

"No; perhaps you would enjoy it more behind Uncle Silas and the mules," I answered cheerily, feeling perfectly capable of handling Baby Tillett and his bag of biscuits, because the memory of the times his little head with its tow fuzz had cuddled down on my linen smock, when I had carried him back and forth for long visits in the barn to the p.e.c.k.e.rwood Pup so his mother could have a little vacation from his society, accelerated the movement of the chant on the cardiac instrument in my breast. "He stays hours and hours with me in a basket in the barn and is perfectly satisfied with the biscuits."

"All the same I told Sallie I could make that dress by another pattern, and you'd better sit with him a good distance during the show," said Mrs.

Addc.o.c.k, as I finished shoe-topping Mamie and picked up my pink-lined white sunbonnet, which had been a present from Mrs. Addc.o.c.k herself and was astonishingly frilly and coquettish emanating from such a source, and began to depart.

"I'll take him on the other side of the auditorium," I answered, with respect for advice that I knew must be good through experience.

And thus that pink and white, cooing, obstreperously hungry baby was made an instrument of cruel fate and--

"Come over and see the little cap I've made Bennie so as to do you honor,"

called rosy Mrs. Tillett as I went down the street towards the grocery.

"I ain't got but six more yards of gingham to sew up for the two littlest,"

Mrs. Spain called cheerily as she looked past a whirring sewing-machine out through a window that was wreathed with a cinnamon rose-vine in full bloom.

"Want any help?" I called from the gate, which was flanked on both sides by blooming lilacs.

"No; you go on down to the store. Mr. Silas have brought out ten suits of clothes for the men to pick from, and they are a-waiting for your taste.

Persuade Joe Spain to get that purple mixed. I do love gay colors, and it'll go with my pink foulard."

The scenes into which I entered in the post-office-bank-grocery was comedy in form, but serious in interpretation. The counter was piled high with men's garments of every color that is bestowed upon woolen cloth in the dyers' vats. Uncle Silas stood behind it with his gla.s.ses at a rampant angle on his nose, and Aunt Mary stood in the center of a shuffling, embarra.s.sed, hara.s.sed group of farmers in overalls. Before her stood Bud, attired in a light gray suit of aggressively new clothes, and she was using him hard as a dummy upon which to ill.u.s.trate her vigorous and persuasive remarks.

"Now, I am glad you have come down, honeybunch," she exclaimed at sight of me. "Here's a bale of clothes and a bale of men, and n.o.body can seem to match 'em up suitable. I have at last got Bud Beesley here into a dead match for his beauty, if I do say it of my own son. Just look at him!" As she spoke she stood off from him and folded her plump hands across her wide waist in motherly rapture.

And Bud, with his violet eyes and yellow shock, _was_ beautiful in the "custom-made," fifteen-dollar gray cheviot, despite his red ears. All the Harpeth Valley farmer folk have French Cavalier, English gentle, and Irish good blood in them, with mighty little else and, as in the case of Bud and Polly Corn-ta.s.sel, when clothed in garments of the world, it comes to the surface with startling effect. Bud could have put on a gray slouch hat with either a crimson or an orange band and walked into any good Eastern college fraternity or club he might have chosen.

"Shoo, Mother," said Bud as he turned around for my admiration, not surfeited with that of his mother.

"I only hope some town girl won't catch him like your mother did William,"

said Aunt Mary, with a laugh that ended in a little sigh that only I heard.

Somehow I _will_ feel psychically akin to Bud and Polly.

[Ill.u.s.tration: And Bud was beautiful in the "custom-made" fifteen-dollar gray cheviot with his violet eyes and yellow smock, in spite of his red ears]

"Town girls are all movie-struck and don't want a man if a b.u.t.ter-paddle goes along with him," said Bud, with a laugh that was echoed from the overalled group.

"Yes, but Miss Nancy here has outsold any woman in Riverfield for cash on eggs and chickens before May first," said Mr. Spain as he picked up a gray purple coat from the top of the pile on the counter.

"She'll marry and go away in a big car, too," said Bud, as he looked down and flecked an imaginary speck from the sleeve of his new coat. Something in his voice made me determine to introduce Belle Proctor's little sixteen-year-old sister to Bud in the near future. The kiddie spends half her time away from school in Bess's conservatory with Mr. G. Bird's non-resident family, and I think it will do her good to come out in the field and play with Bud. She is frail and too slight.