“I’m just glad your millstone wasn’t in place yet,” said Taleswapper, “or you’d be stuffing brains back into my head.”

“What? You’re in Wobbish country, man! There ain’t no need for brains out here.”

“Well, you threw me,” said Taleswapper. “Does that mean you won’t let me earn a bed and a meal?”

“Earn it? No sir. I won’t allow such a thing.” But the grin on his face denied the harshness of his words. “No, no, you can work if you like, because a man likes to feel that he pays his way in the world. But truth is I’d let you stay even if you had two legs broke and couldn’t help a lick. We’ve got a bed all ready for you, just off the kitchen, and I’ll bet a hog against a huckleberry that them boys already told Faith to set another bowl for supper.”

“That’s kind of you, sir.”

“Not at all,” said Alvin Miller. “You sure nothing got broke? You hit them stones awful hard.”

“Then I imagine you ought to check to make sure none of those stones got split, sir.”

Alvin laughed again, slapped him on the back, and led him up to the house.

Such a house it was. There couldn’t be more screeching and shouting in hell. Miller tried to sort out all the children for him. The four older girls were his daughters, busy as could be at half a dozen jobs, each one carrying on separate arguments with each of her sisters, at the top of her voice, passing from quarrel to quarrel as her work took her from room to room. The screaming baby was a grandchild, as were the five toddlers playing Roundheads and Cavaliers on and under the dining table. The mother, Faith, seemed oblivious to it all as she labored in the kitchen. Occasionally she’d reach out to cuff a nearby child, but otherwise she didn’t let them interrupt her work—or her steady stream of orders, rebukes, threats, and complaints.

“How do you keep your wits together, in all this?” Taleswapper asked her.

“Wits?” she asked him sharply. “Do you think anyone with wits would put up with this?”

Miller showed him to his room. That’s what he called it, “your room, as long as you care to stay.” It had a large bed and a feather pillow, and blankets, too, and half of one wall was the back of the chimney, so it was warm. Taleswapper hadn’t been offered a bed like this in all his wandering. “Promise me that your name isn’t really Procrustes,” he said.

Miller didn’t understand the allusion, but it didn’t matter, he knew the look on Taleswapper’s face. No doubt he’d seen it before. “We don’t put our guests in the worst room, Taleswapper, we put them in the best. And no more talk about that.”

“You have to let me work for you tomorrow, then.”