Lemuel
ignored the latter.
"The doctor'll be here at about eleven," he announced. "Mind you listen
to all he says and get Flavilla into a clean nightgown and sheets."
"What's the matter with your tending to her?" Bella demanded.
"I won't be here; not till night. I'm going to put up hay with one of
the farmers. I hear they're in a hurry and offering good money."
Bella's expression was strange. She laughed in a forced way.
"We got to hand it to you," Bowman admitted genially; "you're there. I
guess I'd starve before ever it would come to me to fork hay."
Lemuel's wife added nothing; her lips twisted into a fixed smile at
once defiant and almost tremulous. Well, he was late now; he couldn't
linger to inquire into Bella's moods. Yet at the door he hesitated
again to impress on her the importance of attending the doctor's every
word.
It seemed to him an hour later that he was burning up in a dry
intolerable haze of sun and hay. He awkwardly balanced heavy ragged
forkfuls, heaving them onto the mounting stack of the wagon in a paste
of sweat and dust. His eyes were filmed and his throat dry. He
struggled on in the soft unaccustomed tyranny of the grass, the glare
of sun, with his mind set on the close of day. He thought of cool
shadows, of city streets wet at night, and a swift plunge into a river
where it swept about the thrust of a wharf. He wondered what Doctor
Markley would say about Flavilla; probably the child wasn't seriously
sick.
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